Quick Test: PHP 5.6 Against Facebook's HHVM

While PHP 5.6 was just released, Facebook's HHVM remains a competitive, alternative implementation that continues gaining new features and is being ruthlessly optimized by Facebook engineers.

After the PHP 5.6.0 release yesterday I ran some tests of PHP 5.6.0, PHP 5.5.16, and PHP 5.4.32. In that test -- which was using a built-in test of the PHP-based Phoronix Test Suite -- I found the speed of code execution for these common hot paths hadn't changed much from PHP 5.5 to PHP 5.6.

This morning I decided to fire up the latest HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) code (v5.6.99-hhvm) to see how its performance compares to PHP 5.6.0 with the Phoronix Test Suite code-paths. The phoronix-test-suite debug-self-test output on PHP 5.6 from yesterday was:

### OVERALL DATA ###

PHP:  5.6.0
DETAILED_SYSTEM_INFO:          0.065 seconds
LIST_AVAILABLE_TESTS:          0.342 seconds
LIST_AVAILABLE_SUITES:         16.346 seconds
INFO:                          0.016 seconds
CLONE_OPENBENCHMARKING_RESULT: 61.829 seconds
RESULT_FILE_TO_TEXT:           8.552 seconds
DIAGNOSTICS:                   0.012 seconds
DUMP_POSSIBLE_OPTIONS:         0.010 seconds

ELAPSED TIME:                  261.519 seconds
PEAK MEMORY USAGE:             38.25 MB
PEAK MEMORY USAGE (emalloc):   33.915 MB

When running the latest HHVM on the same system with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

### OVERALL DATA ###

PHP:  5.6.99-hhvm
DETAILED_SYSTEM_INFO:          0.221 seconds
LIST_AVAILABLE_TESTS:          0.314 seconds
LIST_AVAILABLE_SUITES:         14.427 seconds
INFO:                          0.044 seconds
CLONE_OPENBENCHMARKING_RESULT: 64.520 seconds
RESULT_FILE_TO_TEXT:           9.320 seconds
DIAGNOSTICS:                   0.048 seconds
DUMP_POSSIBLE_OPTIONS:         0.026 seconds

ELAPSED TIME:                  266.769 seconds
PEAK MEMORY USAGE:             556.339 MB
PEAK MEMORY USAGE (emalloc):   78 MB

HHVM is now coming in just behind PHP 5.6 for this particular test. The peak memory usage is also shocking for HHVM but I don't know if their implementation of memory_get_peak_usage() is just radically different from PHP, etc.

Those wanting to learn more about Facebook's HHVM PHP implementation can visit HHVM.com.