PHPNG (next generation)

This page gives short information about development state of a new PHP branch based on refactored Zend Engine.

The phpng branch has been merged into master and has been used as the base for PHP 7.0

Some technical implementation details are available at phpng-int. Information for extension maintainers at phpng-upgrading.

Slides from a talk at ZendCon-2014 phpng-php7.pdf

Note: For anonymous checkout, use https://git.php.net/repository/php-src.git instead of git@git.php.net:php-src.git

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
git clone git@git.php.net:php-src.git
cd php-src
./buildconf
./configure \
 --prefix=$HOME/tmp/usr \
 --with-config-file-path=$HOME/tmp/usr/etc \
 --enable-mbstring \
 --enable-zip \
 --enable-bcmath \
 --enable-pcntl \
 --enable-ftp \
 --enable-exif \
 --enable-calendar \
 --enable-sysvmsg \
 --enable-sysvsem \
 --enable-sysvshm \
 --enable-wddx \
 --with-curl \
 --with-mcrypt \
 --with-iconv \
 --with-gmp \
 --with-pspell \
 --with-gd \
 --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
 --with-png-dir=/usr \
 --with-zlib-dir=/usr \
 --with-xpm-dir=/usr \
 --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
 --with-t1lib=/usr \
 --enable-gd-native-ttf \
 --enable-gd-jis-conv \
 --with-openssl \
 --with-mysql=/usr \
 --with-pdo-mysql=/usr \
 --with-gettext=/usr \
 --with-zlib=/usr \
 --with-bz2=/usr \
 --with-recode=/usr \
 --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config
make
make install
mkdir $HOME/tmp/usr/etc
vi $HOME/tmp/usr/etc/php.ini

max_execution_time=600
memory_limit=128M
error_reporting=0
display_errors=0
log_errors=0
user_ini.filename=
realpath_cache_size=2M
cgi.check_shebang_line=0

zend_extension=opcache.so
opcache.enable_cli=1
opcache.save_comments=0
opcache.fast_shutdown=1
opcache.validate_timestamps=1
opcache.revalidate_freq=60
opcache.use_cwd=1
opcache.max_accelerated_files=100000
opcache.max_wasted_percentage=5
opcache.memory_consumption=128
opcache.consistency_checks=0

Now PHP must be installed and configured. The final check.

$ sapi/cli/php -v
PHP 7.0.0-dev (cli) (built: Apr 28 2014 11:13:04) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2014 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.7.0-dev, Copyright (c) 1998-2014 Zend Technologies
 with Zend OPcache v7.0.4-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2014, by Zend Technologies

You may run synthetic benchmarks

$ sapi/cli/php Zend/bench.php
$ sapi/cli/php Zend/micro_bench.php

You may measure the performance of some web applications

$ sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 1000 /var/www/html/wordpress/index.php > /dev/null''

You may do the same with callgrind profiler

$ valgrind --tool=callgrind --dump-instr=yes --separate-recs=1 sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 100 /var/www/html/wordpress/index.php > /dev/null

Finally, you may run PHP as FastCGI server using CGI SAPI or FPM (it requires additional configuration)

$ PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=4 PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=0 sapi/cgi/php-cgi -b /tmp/fcgi-php

I would recommend build PHP from master and phpng branches and compare their performance

• cli
• cgi
• fpm
• apache (FastCGI and FPM might be significantly faster if mod_php is built as PIC)
• apache2handler

• bcmath
• bz2
• calendar
• com_dotnet
• ctype
• curl
• date
• dba
• dom
• enchant
• ereg
• exif
• fileinfo
• filter
• ftp
• gd
• gettext
• gmp
• hash
• iconv
• imap
• intl
• json
• ldap
• libxml
• mbstring
• mcrypt
• mysql
• mysqli
• mysqlnd
• odbc (tested with unixODBC and MySQL driver)
• openssl
• OPcache
• pcntl
• pcre
• PDO
• pdo_firebird
• pdo_mysql
• PDO_ODBC (tested with unixODBC and MySQL driver)
• pdo_pgsql
• pdo_sqlite
• pgsql
• Phar
• posix
• pspell
• readline
• recode
• Reflection
• session
• shmop
• SimpleXML
• snmp
• soap
• sockets
• SPL
• sqlite3
• standard
• sysvmsg
• sysvsem
• sysvshm
• tidy
• tokenizer
• wddx
• xml
• xmlreader
• xmlwriter
• xsl
• zip
• zlib

• interbase
• mssql
• oci8
• pdo_dblib
• pdo_oci
• sybase_ct

1. PHPNG doesn't keep original values of arguments passed to user functions, so func_get_arg() and func_get_args() will return current value of argument instead of the actually passed. The following code is going to be affected “function foo($x) { $x = 2; return func_get_arg(0);} var_dump(foo(1));”
   • tests/lang/func_get_arg.001.phpt
   • tests/lang/func_get_args.004.phpt
2. Function parameters with duplicate name are not allowed anymore. Definitions like “function foo($x,$x) {}” will lead to compile time error “Redefinition of parameter”
   • Zend/tests/bug54013.phpt
   • Zend/tests/bug64515.phpt
3. var_dump() may print recursive data structures differently
   • Zend/tests/closure_026.phpt
4. Passing scalars by reference may behave differently, because they don't have reference counters anymore

• foreach may behave differently
  • tests/lang/foreachLoop.013.phpt
  • tests/lang/foreachLoop.014.phpt
  • tests/lang/foreachLoop.015.phpt
• Internal object constructors can't set $this to NULL when called indirectly - parent::__construct()
  • ext/date/tests/bug67118.phpt
  • ext/date/tests/bug67118_2.phpt
• Passing scalars by reference may behave differently, because they don't have reference counters anymore

• They might be also useful for APCU.
• Use interned zend_strings for often used strings in C code.
• move zend_op.lineno into a separate compressed debug_info table.

We constantly measure the performance evaluation using the following 4 tests

• bench.php (sec) - time taken to execute Zend/bench.php

sapi/cli/php ../Zend/bench.php

• bench.php (instr) - number of CPU instructions for Zend/bench.php execution

valgrind --tool=callgrind sapi/cli/php ../Zend/bench.php

• WordPress (sec) - time taken to perform 1000 requests to wordpress-3.6.0 home page

sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 1000 /var/www/html/bench/wordpress-3.6/index.php > /dev/null

• WordPress (instr) - number of CPU instructions for 100 requests to wordpress-3.6.0 home page

valgrind --tool=callgrind sapi/cgi/php-cgi -T 100 /var/www/html/bench/wordpress-3.6/index.php > /dev/null

more benchmarks