high performance php: scaling and getting the most out of your infrastructure

©All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.

High performance PHP: How do I make it go faster?Maurice Kherlakian

Professional Services Consultant

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

©All rights reserved. Zend Technologies, Inc.2

Agenda

• What we will be covering The network, database, and application aspects in optimization

Tools and techniques that assist in optimization (Code tracing, profiling)

OS level optimizations and tools

Best practices in application development for an optimized application

Server clustering

DEMO


The network

• Entry point into your system

• Needs to be secured Firewall

Layer separation: External – DMZ - internal

• Unless you have one server, need to find a traffic distribution mechanism – Load balancers

Different kinds of load balancers: hardware v/s software

Hardware appliances are costly but robust, do layer 7 lb

Software alternatives are cheaper, do a good job also

• HAProxy

• Ldirectord

• Nginx, Apache with balancer modules


The network

• Reverse proxyAvoid having application servers in an externally

accessible environment

Can also be used to load balance

Apache, nginx, lighttpd

Usually reverse proxy connect to backend servers


The web server

• Different alternatives – choose based on performance

Apache – mod_php

Nginx, lighty with php-fcgi or php-fpm

Windows IIS – FastCGI

• Zend ServerApache-based, on Linux, Windows, IBM i

Zend engine


Web servers clustering

• 1st step towards scaling solutionAfter moving the database to a separate server

Configuration syncing: rsync, rmp/deb, svn

Application code deployment

ZSCM


Deployment strategies

• SVN as a deployment tool

• RPM/deb

• PEAR

• Zend Server .zpk

• More info: watch deployment strategies webinar (http://www.zend.com/en/resources/webinars/php)

• Check out Shahar’s Best practices in deploying PHP apps

http://www.zend.com/en/resources/webinars/php


Web servers session clustering

• What is session clustering

• Failing over to other servers

• Mechanisms for session clusteringMemcached

Lightweight key/value server

Database

Zend Server SC


Opcode caching

• What is it, why virtually every PHP site uses it

• Drastic effects of code tracing(Screenshot next slide)

• Different opcode cachesAPC, eaccelerator, xcache

Zend Server Optimizer+

• Extra performance boost – check timestamp


strace with and without O+ activated

• 10 times less system calls with O+ active


Static content

• Why should we separate static/dynamic content

• Techniques for content separationCDN

Separate sub-domains

Reverse proxying with rules for static content


Handling large files

• Why large files should not be served from PHP

• Serve large files from a lightweight web serverLighty, nginx

• Securing large files downloadModules for web servers – authentication logic, then

offload to web server. Usually through headers

Zend Download server


• To achieve an optimal cluster, many different packages

• What if one solution existed that could do all this?

• Zend serverOptimizer + for code caching

Full page caching

ZSCM for server sync

Code tracing/monitoring for app monitoring

Zend Download server


Linux(rpm/web repositories)

IBM i(PTF)

Windows(MSI)

ApplicationPerformance

Acceleration

Optimization

Caching

Reliability& Management

Monitoring

Root-Cause

Configuration

Scale-Out

Clustering

Job Queue

Downloads

Business-gradePHP

Hot Fixes

Support

Java Bridge

Zend Framework

PHP

Zend Server

Zen

d S

tudio

(Ecl

ipse

-base

d)

Colla

bora

teD

ebug

Pro

file

Test

Zend Server14


Database scaling

• Scaling techniquesReplication

Functional separation

Sharding

• Schemaless databases eg: MongoDB

• For analytics, consider a column-oriented database like Infobright


Database results caching

• Shared memory (APC)

• Distributed caching (memcached)

• Zend Server data cache

• But all of that doesn’t matter if your application is not optimized!


The application

• No cookbook for good application design

• Don’t optimize in early development, risk over-optimization

• FrameworksFrameworks can make you fall in over-architecting trap

Possible mistakes using DBAL or ORM – like lazy joins

End up making a lot more queries than necessary


The application

• Write application for what it is intended to be used

• (ex: file processing: load entire file v/s one line at a time: first approach works well for a few queries, but under high load 2nd approach better)


The secrets to application optimization

• Using the right toolsXdebug

Zend Server Code tracing (demo)

Profiling (demo)

• Monitor execution time and memory usage

• Design intelligently

• Know the hardware you’re writing for and how it operates. The more you know about it, the better your app will be


Database optimizations

• Statements tuning

• Tables indexing

• Monitor all queries to DBUse profiling tools, if using DBAL usually provides one

ZF provides Zend_Db_Profiler that allows logging of queries to later study them (demo)

Zend_Db_Profiler_Firebug: cool tool that allows displaying all queries on Firebug. Completely independent from page itself, no interference with JSON or XML requests

• Use Explain, tune criteria, avoid lazy joins


How do we fix problems

• Found a bottleneck, how do we fix it?Rewrite logic to be less demanding, or more demanding,

but get to endpoint faster

• CachingFile caching

Shared mem caching

Distributed (memcached)

• Adding caching should be easy on a well architected app

Domain model

• Caching in most cases is NOT a silver bullet.


High server loads

• App is optimized, traffic growing, servers start to cough…

• Where is the problem?

• Your application can be cpu-bound, io-bound or memory bound. So how do you find out?

Use tools like top, vmstat, iostat

• Why is this important?


Recap

• Be smart!

• Look at the problem, understand it, and solve it.

• Using var_dump is NOT the solution, neither is shooting in the dark

• Use the right toolset

• Wealth of resources (white papers/webinars…) on zend.com

high performance php: scaling and getting the most out of your infrastructure

Technology

zend technologies

zend engine

headers zend download

xcache zend server optimizer

application servers

application optimization

lightweight web server

application development