Pressflow with HipHop for PHP

Posted by michee.lengronne on May 9, 2012 at 11:19am

IS there a way to compile Pressflow with HipHop for PHP ?

I would like the most performant Drupal because I have to enable a lot of modules in it (when I say a lot, my modules folder contains currently 333 projects), and the site will have to handle with a huge number of users and contents.

Comments

333 projects!?

Posted by Kimitri on May 9, 2012 at 12:06pm

That really is quite a tremendous amount of modules. I have a really hard time imagining a site that makes full use of, say, more than 60 projects. I'd say you're bound to run into heaps of trouble with such a vast amount of modules. But if you are successfully running the site at the moment, I'd really like to hear some background information on this project.

Before considering using something as exotic as HipHop for PHP to speed things up, I'd get rid of a lot of the modules and ensured that all the different caching layers were functioning as efficiently as possible.

Given the rediculous number

Posted by alanmackenzie on May 9, 2012 at 12:21pm

Given the rediculous number of modules you have installed I would be inclined to look closley at the following APC configuration values before getting stuck into HipHop:

apc.shm_size
apc.max_file_size

This might be relevant to:

apc.num_files_hint

http://www.linkedin.com/in/linuxwizard

Well

Posted by perusio on May 9, 2012 at 12:38pm

there's no silver bullet. In fact 333 is a huge number. Even extremely large sites stay under 250, usually, from what I've seen so far.

HipHop is not easy to use. There are issues with drupal. Check this.

My suggestion. Approach the problem from several angles:

Cache as much as possible.
Optimize SQL queries to the max and over.
Configure APC with care.
Use HipHop if you must. But be aware of the costs of doing so. It involves
things like hacked libs besides the drupal side of things.

Perhaps you can check to see if this will help you

Posted by rgristroph on May 9, 2012 at 4:31pm

I think re-writing Drupal or parts of Drupal or maybe part or all of Symphony in C as a PHP extension is a really interesting idea. I would like to work on something like that; several years ago I did that for a company's internal, proprietary PHP cms, and it was a success.

However, I think you should check as much as possible to see what speedup you might expect. By using xhprof or NewRelic you should be able to identify how much of the page load time is in PHP versus in MySQL, Memcache, or other systems. Hiphop is generally reported to give a speedup of around 2x, and if PHP is only 40% of your page load then the best you can expect is 20% increase in exchange for a difficult to manage setup. You might do better tuning other parts of your stack.

If there is a lot of time spent in PHP, first identify where that is and figure out if there is a simpler way to avoid it.

Most large sites where performance matters find that there is more low-hanging fruit in terms of caching and site configuration than there is in optimizing the PHP execution.

Also, you should examine your APC cache stats and make sure you don't have so much code that you are filling the cache and having to re-process PHP code on every page load, as alanmackenzie and perusio have already mentioned.

Speaking of re-writing

Posted by greggles on May 9, 2012 at 6:52pm

Speaking of re-writing Drupal/Parts of Drupal in as a PHP extension, someone has done that http://drupal.org/project/drupal_php_ext :) Just needs some more functions converted to become more helpful.

knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation

pressflow hiphop instructions

Posted by pdrake on May 10, 2012 at 3:42am

There are instructions for compiling pressflow 6.x (you didn't say what core version you were running) with hiphop: https://pressflow.atlassian.net/wiki/display/PF/Building+Pressflow+with+...

But I want to echo the rest of the comments above - hiphop should probably be your very last resort for performance improvement. Reducing the number of modules, reducing code complexity, optimizing SQL queries, enabling proper caching, etc will likely provide greater performance gains with far less investment and fewer maintenance headaches.

I would recommend checking out tracelytics or new relic to get a good handle on the performance bottlenecks in your web application. I believe both offer a free trial period.

Pressflow Drupal Caching issue

Posted by Kuriakose Kurian on May 17, 2012 at 1:56am

Hi Expert team,

I'm new to Drupal, now managing a Drupal web site, which is using Pressflow Drupal 6. The site is having good traffic. The server’s architecture as follows:

One Load balancer connected to two webserver (Sever 1, Sever 2) and two MYSQL database is replicated for serving the Web server. DB 1 act as Master and DB2 act as Slave.

My issue is – the website goes down 1 or two times in in a Day and then I need to log as admin and then clear the Cache. Once I clear the cache the site become available to public.
I’m not sure what is causing the issue. I believe it may due to some module issue or CSS caching issue.

Here are the details about the setting in “Page Cache” configuration page
1) Caching Mode: Normal(recommended for production sites, no side effects)
2) Minimum cache lifetime: 10 Min
3) Page cache maximum age: None
4) Page compression: Enabled
5) Block cache: Disabled
6) Optimize CSS files: Enabled
7) Optimize JavaScript files: Enabled

Please see the list of modules incorporated on the site, I do have few custom modules as well

advanced_help
autologout
better_formats
cck
cck_facets
ckeditor
context
ctools
date
diff
email
faceted_search
field_indexer
filefield
globalredirect
google_analytics
imagefield
imce
imce_mkdir
imce_wysiwyg
jquery_ui
jquery_update
libraries
menu_breadcrumb
messaging
mimedetect
module_grants
mollom
notifications
og
og_menu
pathauto
path_redirect
revisioning
rules
securepages
securepages_prevent_hijack
sharedemail
strongarm
taxonomy_access
token
transliteration
views
views_bulk_operations
workflow
wysiwyg
xmlsitemap

Please help me to figure out the issue. Let me know if I need to provide any more information

Kindest regards,
Kuriakose

Issues

Posted by mikeytown2 on May 17, 2012 at 2:15am

For CSS issues I highly recommend using AdvAgg, it should solve 99% of them if clearing the cache fixes it.

Another issue I've had with pressflow where clearing the cache fixes it has to do with the variables in the cache getting corrupted. This is the pull request for that fix: https://github.com/pressflow/6/pull/37

Be sure to apply this patch for views3: http://drupal.org/node/853864#comment-4247614 or for views2: http://drupal.org/node/853864#comment-3898996

Finally checkout the wiki for other useful things: http://groups.drupal.org/node/187209

Please post a new discussion

Posted by dalin on May 17, 2012 at 2:04pm

Please post a new discussion for a new topic, don't hijack an existing thread.

What do you mean by "Site goes down". We need a better bug report.

Also don't use minimum cache lifetime - it causes all sorts of seemingly unrelated bugs.

I do however strongly recommend Block Caching. Second only to the page cache, it is probably the single biggest thing that you can do to improve performance and scalability.

Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his