Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
PHP-PM is a novel way of running PHP applications. Instead of creating an exotic high performance runtime for the PHP language, it takes an alternative route to mechanism of running PHP applications with existing runtimes.
This translates to real performance gains with existing complex applications, not just impressive theoretical benchmark results.
Time to first paint is the one of the most critical user experience for web sites. Essentially what this means is the moment the user sees something on their screens after following a link. This gives the perception of a fast load time, and first impressions count on the web.
Benjamin Eberlei from Tideways has written an excellent series of articles on performance with bits and pieces that PHP and Symfony developers come into contact often.
I wrote an article on using CloudFlare to manage traffic peaks. A commenter on Reddit wished for some statistics. I cannot retrospectively get any response comparison times or anything that would be a truly meaningful benchmark.
Every once in a while you're lucky and end up with a positive problem - your website content is suddenly very popular. You might scramble and start turning up your servers and tuning up your caches or maybe someone's de-facto solution is to install HHVM to run your WordPress faster.
While this is all worth while if you plan for this to happen in the future as well, for and occasional hit piece of content it might not be worth it.