Wikipedia Switches Over To HHVM For Faster Performance

Since a few weeks ago, all non-cached API and web traffic of Wikipedia is being served by Facebook's HHVM rather than PHP proper.

Wikipedia ended up adopting Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) for its PHP needs to replace PHP.net 5.3. Of course, the primary motive in switching to HHVM was for greater performance of the PHP-based MediaWiki. For end-users, most Wikipedia pages are served from a static cache while the PHP performance matters the most for its editors when editing pages, previewing pages, etc.

The HHVM-powered Wikipedia is certainly much faster than using PHP. Beyond the page save times, the CPU load was also measurably reduced with switching over to Facebook's PHP interpreter.

Brett Simmers of Facebook's HHVM team wrote about Wikipedia's switch on the HHVM.com blog.