PHPNG – future of PHP

PHPNG is a new branch of PHP development. It aims to bring better memory usage efficiency and performance. PHPNG is focused on PHP’s VM Zend Engine. PHPNG aims to provide the maximum performance for current applications by rebuilding internal structures of PHP. Existing structure leads to the next time expenditures: 20% of time are used for tasks of memory manager, 10%  – for hash tables, 30%  – for call internal functions and only 30% – for execution in virtual machine. PHPNG can do a 10-30% execution speed improvement by changing this structure. Also it leads to some memory savings.

Next results were shown in a case of some test apps:

• ZF test app shows +30.5% in performance (growth from 166 to 217 requests per second)

• WordPress 3.6 – +20.0% (211 – 253)

• Qdig – +15.3% (482 – 555)

• Drupal 6.1 – +11.7% (1585 – 1770)

PHPNG branch will be merged into the next PHP major release. The idea behind the PHPNG is to run existing PHP code avoiding any changes. In such case users will not be required to change their code, but existing PHP extensions will not work without adaptations.

The major drawback of PHPNG is the lack of support for mod_php SAPI. The reason for discontinuation is the claim that using any Web servers with FastCGI or cognate SAPI would be more efficient than using mod_php. The problem is that many PHP applications rely on features associated with mod_php, so with future PHP major release developers should find brand new solutions to avoid this current problem.

We will try to gather all the important information about usage Magento with PHPNG in this post so get ready for updates.