Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

They note that 5.6 has some substantial performance improvements over 5.3. I'd point out that PHP 7, coming out later this year, will be even faster (perhaps as much as 2x 5.6), since some very smart people have done some big internal refactoring in the Zend engine, largely to reduce allocations, pointer indirection, and memory usage. These efforts combined have resulted in pretty big performance gains, making PHP 7 more competitive with HHVM performance-wise. In addition, writing PHP extensions is somewhat nicer now.

Zeev Suraski (one of the original two Zend Engine authors along with Andi Gutmans, also co-founder of Zend, Inc.) did some benchmarks:

http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng.ht...

http://zsuraski.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/benchmarking-phpng-ma...

However, bear in mind that those benchmarks were faked* by Zeev, a Zend Engine proponent. Benchmarks faked* by HHVM engineers might show a larger gap. ;)

* I'm not using "faked" in its normal sense. They probably weren't fraudulent, but I am a believer that we should say "fake a benchmark" and not "make a benchmark" given that they can be so circumstantial and misleading: http://blog.ajf.me/2014-10-23-on-benchmarks

Disclaimer: I am, myself, biased towards the Zend Engine, I'm a php-src committer.

I make a point to say "synthetic benchmarks" for such circumstances. It clearly conveys that the benchmark is contrived, likely to demonstrate a particular point, but it avoids the negative connotations.

Ah, that's a good term for it. I like "faked" because it has added humour value (it's rather "ha ha only serious"). Without using a disclaimer around it, though, someone will probably smack me.

Use `fake' in speech, where you can convey more context, and `synthetic' in writing?

I'd say the other way around, honestly. In writing I can stick a * there so it's obvious that there's more to it than it seems. In speech, unless it's explained beforehand, it might not be a good idea.

I really thought that when you wrote "faked" that reflected on Zeev's character. That he was trying to pull a fast one. Only after encountering the disclaimer did I realize what you meant. Many people won't read the disclaimer, and therefore when dealing with someone's reputation you should pick a word which might avoid misunderstanding.

Fair point.

I might say some things about Zeev, but I certainly wouldn't say he's a liar. He's a talented developer.

Saying someone's faked a benchmark is an extraordinarily serious accusation of professional malpractice. I think your little joke is a very misguided.

Having seen how the sausage is made at many performance oriented companies this seems to be a bit of an overstatement.

Air-quotes? Or just stick to boring words.

I think that techempower is a neutral third party yet they show php having a huge advantage over hhvm[1]

[1] : https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

That's JSON serialisation, it may just be that HHVM has a faster JSON library.

hhvm is still far faster and generally uses less memory. The development pace is also much faster. Zend is on the outs, and that's a good thing.

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