Forum:HHVM

Hello everyone!

I am actually really pleased to be writing this post because it means we have made a major change to Orain which is also a positive. This change is in particular special because it is a change to our infrastructure.

As of September 20th, I have released a new Beta Feature for all wikis called 'HHVM'. When users enable this feature, a cookie (hhvm) will be set and nginx will pick this up and relay all FastCGI requests for HHVM on prod8. HHVM in short is a new PHP runtime environment with built in FastCGI, the theory is this will decrease page loads and reduce our memory and CPU use. For reference, an Orain wiki running on PHP5 takes an overage of 811.70 milliseconds to load from start to finish. An Orain wiki running on HHVM cuts this down to 542.10 milliseconds. Currently while writing this, I am also averaging 300 milliseconds so there is a major improvement :)

Everyone can enable the feature by going to Special:Preferences on the selected wiki and ticking 'HHVM'. Feedback is welcomed in different forms. Feel free to leave a message here, on my talk page on metawiki or techwiki or drop me an email, john@undefinedorain.org.

If no major issues occur before next Friday, it is my intention to enable this as default for all wikis with no opt-in or opt-out feature. Please note, during the time when I make the switch - we will be upgrading all of our servers to Ubuntu 14.04 as well so for a small duration of time wikis will not be editable, mail will not be outgoing and user sessions may possibly drop.

I thank you all for your understanding and support as I work on making Orain's infrastructure a lot more secure and it is my hope I will continue this work for a few more months to the point where wikis will load almost immediately but that is a while away.

On behalf of Orain staff, John (talk) 20:10, 20 September 2014 (BST)