A month ago, I went on a performance quest trying to optimize a PHP script that took 5 days to run. Together with the help of many talented developers, I eventually got it to run in under 30 seconds. This optimization process with so much fun, and so many people pitched in with their ideas; so I eventually decided I wanted to do something more.
That's why I built a performance challenge for the PHP community
The goal of this challenge is to parse 100 million rows of data with PHP, as efficiently as possible. The challenge will run for about two weeks, and at the end there are some prizes for the best entries (amongst the prize is the very sought-after PhpStorm Elephpant, of which we only have a handful left).
Microbenchmarks are very different from optimizing performance in real applications in wide use though, they could do great on this specific benchmark but still have no clue about how to actually make something large like Wordpress to perform OK out of the box.
> A month ago, I went on a performance quest trying to optimize a PHP script that took 5 days to run. Together with the help of many talented developers, I eventually got it to run in under 30 seconds
That's a huge improvement! How much was low hanging fruit unrelated to the PHP interpreter itself, out of curiosity? (E.g. parallelism, faster SQL queries etc)
- Cursor based pagination
- Combining insert statements
- Using database transactions to prevent fsync calls
- Moving calculations from the database to PHP
- Avoiding serialization where possible
in all my years doing database tuning/admin/reliability/etc, performance have overwhelmingly been in the bad query/bad data pattern categories. the data platform is rarely the issue
That's why I built a performance challenge for the PHP community
The goal of this challenge is to parse 100 million rows of data with PHP, as efficiently as possible. The challenge will run for about two weeks, and at the end there are some prizes for the best entries (amongst the prize is the very sought-after PhpStorm Elephpant, of which we only have a handful left).
I hope people will have fun with it :)
A Wordpress instance will happily take over 20 seconds to fully load if you disable cache.
Where do I get my prize? ;)
That's a huge improvement! How much was low hanging fruit unrelated to the PHP interpreter itself, out of curiosity? (E.g. parallelism, faster SQL queries etc)
A couple of things I did:
- Cursor based pagination - Combining insert statements - Using database transactions to prevent fsync calls - Moving calculations from the database to PHP - Avoiding serialization where possible
https://elephpant.me/
Except that the generator script generates dates relative to time() ?