How can I test performance of a PHP app using Apache Benchmark?
My environment is Ubuntu Linux - are there packages I can install?
If you have Apache 2 installed, Apache Benchmark is already installed. See man ab on how to use it. In most cases its just something like
ab -n 1000 -c 10 http://localhost/path/to/app
Where -n is the number of all requests, that should be performed and -c is the number of requests, that should be performed in concurrency.
Note, that you don't test the performance of your php project this way, but test everything, that is affected, beginning with the webserver, PHP, your application, the database, your filesystem, and so on. This means, that if you got poor results, that can also be caused by low memory, or you have just many stuff running in the background, or such. Use a profiler to analyze the performance of a php application. A profiler is built-in within xdebug.
Related
I'm setting several cronjobs for PHP scripts so I want to know which option is better to CPU/RAM performance. I have a CentOS 7.3 server
I would definitely go with PHP CLI, less overhead.
I run a few crontasks myself and just sticking the following in your crontab (changed to use your files of course) makes it simple.
php -f /var/www/cron.php
You can run some tests to confirm it's better for you though - see which one runs quicker and uses less memory.
I followed this tutorial for installing here:
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/Building-and-installing-HHVM-on-Ubuntu-13.04
But I can't figure out how to run it. I've gone to to the hphp/hhvm/hhvm and I've run this on hhhm
root#hhvm-ubuntu:~/dev/hiphop-php/hphp/hhvm# ls
CMakeFiles CMakeLists.txt hhvm main.cpp process_init.cpp
cmake_install.cmake global_variables.cpp link_hphp.sh Makefile process_init.h
The problem is each time I run, the server crashes. Actually the server is slow with hhvm install, its a 1 GB instance on Rackspace. But how am I suppose to run hip-hop after compiling from source?
You just run hphp/hhvm/hhvm some_file.php if you want it in command line or hphp/hhvm/hhvm -m server /some/document_root/ for a server. Look on the wiki for more config information.
I don't have the link handy, but 1 gb is not enough to run HipHopVM. The process itself will easily chew up that amount of ram by itself. When it chews up more ram than you have it will slow to a crawl and then eventually crash.
Try using it in a 4gig instance. You may have better luck.
Take a look at this article for some more info on configuring hhvm.
I have installed PHP5 - PHP5-MEMCACHE - PHP-APC.
Can they work like that together? Will the loading be fast with these modules ?
I tried to use them, I don't "see" particular differences, maybe the CPU is used less with these modules. My website doesn't have high traffic, but If i can save resources is better!
Thank you
APC keeps cache of PHP bytecode. Memcache keeps cache of your vars, that you set.
So answer is Yes, they can. They're made for different things.
They work together very well, you just need to use them properly :
Memcached is a distributed cache system. What that means in a nutshell is that if you have a cluster of servers all of them can access the same cache pool
APC is an opcache and local cache system. Meaning it optimizes the php scripts so when going through the compiler less operations are made and the code is executed way faster. Another use of APC is local cache, which means you can store values in the cache and access them from the machine running the code.
Yes, they can work together. Whether they will on a production system is another story...
Personally, I had to give up trying to get the following to work for any extended period of time:
Ubuntu 10.04
NGINX 0.7.65
PHP 5.3.2
php-apc
php5-memcache
It will run for awhile, but after stress testing php errors out. I can restart php-fastcgi via /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi and things will role along for some time more, but it always crashes again sooner than later.
I can run either/or without issue, but the two together won't cooperate for me. FYI I tried using binaries (apt-get packages), installing as PECL extensions, downloading source, but all roads lead me to the same sad fate. I also tried running the memache daemon local & remotely on my web host, but same outcome.
I'm working on mmo game based on JavaScript and PHP. We are using both of them. I can't tell you more, beacause I am only frontend developer, however I think if APC and memcache were bad we were not using it.
I have created a php script to import rss feed into the database. The feed which is huge (from year 2004 to 2010, approx 2 million records) has to be inserted into the database. I have been running the script in browser but the pace it is inserting (approx. 1 per second) i doubt it takes another 20-25 days to input this data even if i run it 24 hrs a day. I have tried it running on different browser windows at the same time and have finished only 70000 records in last two days. I am not sure how the server would react if i run 10-12 instances of it simultaneously.
A programmer at my client's end says that i could run it directly on the server through command line. Could anyone tell me how much difference it would make if i run it through command line? Also what is the command line syntax to run it? I am on apache, php/mysql. I tried out over the web for a similar answer but they seem quite confusing to me as i am not a system administrator or that good in linux although i have done tasks like svn repositories and installing some apache modules on server in the past so i hope i could manage this if someone tell me how to do it.
Difference in speed: Minimal. All you save on is blocking on NET I/O and connection (and the apache overhead which is negligible).
How to do it:
bash> php -f /path/to/my/php/script.php
You may only have the php5-mod package installed which is php for apache, you may have to install the actual command line interpreter, however a lot of distros install both. Personally I think you have an efficiency problem in the algorithm. Something taking days and days seems like it could be sped up by caching & worst-case performance analysis (Big-O notation).
Also, php vanilla isn't very fast, there's lots of ways to make it really fast, but if you're doing heavy computation, you should consider c/c++, C#/Mono (Maybe), possibly python (can be pre-compiled, may not actually be much faster).
But the exploration of these other outlets is highly recommended.
Only providing the filename to execute is sufficient:
php -f <YourScriptHere.php>
See the documentation for more command line options.
To run a php script in the command line just execute:
php yourscript.php
If you want to keep this process running in background do:
php yourscript.php &
You can then run several processes at the same time. To identify the instances of the script that are currently running execute:
ps aux | grep yourscript.php
However, if you think it takes too long, try to find out whether there's any bottleneck in your code and optimize it.
in linux:
php -f file.php
type
php --help
for other options
You may also need the -n option (no php.ini file) or options to specify where php-cli.ini or php.ini file can be found.
Does APC module in PHP when running in CLI mode support code optimization? For example, when I run a file with php -f <file> will the file be optimized with APC before executing or not? Presuming APC is set to load in config file. Also, will the scripts included with require_once be also optimized?
I know optimization works fine when running in fastcgi mode, but I'm wondering if it also works in CLI.
apc_* functions work, but I'm wondering about the code optimization, which is the main thing I'm after here.
Happy day,
Matic
The documentation of apc.enable_cli, which control whether APC should be activated in CLI mode, says (quoting) :
Mostly for testing and debugging.
Setting this enables APC for the CLI
version of PHP. Under normal
circumstances, it is not ideal to
create, populate and destroy the APC
cache on every CLI request, but for
various test scenarios it is useful to
be able to enable APC for the CLI
version of PHP easily.
Maybe APC will store the opcodes in memory, but as the PHP executable dies at the end of the script, that memory will be lost : it will not persist between executions of the script.
So opcode-cache in APC is useless in CLI mode : it will not optimize anything, as PHP will still have to re-compile the source to opcodes each time PHP's executable is launched.
Actually, APC doesn't "optimize" : the standard way of executing a PHP script is like this :
read the file, and compile it into opcodes
execute the opcodes
What APC does is store in opcodes in memory, so the execution of a PHP script becomes :
read the opcodes from memory (much faster than compiling the source-code)
execute the opcodes
But this means you must have some place in memory to store the opcodes. When running PHP as an Apache module, Apache is responsible for the persistence of that memory segment... When PHP is run from CLI, there is nothing to keep the memory segment there, so it is destroyed at the end of PHP's execution.
(I don't know how it works exactly, but it's something like that, at least in the principles, even if my words are not very "technical" ^^ )
Or, by "optimization" you mean something else than opcode cache, like the configuration directive apc.optimization ? If so, this one has been removed in APC 3.0.13
If you have CLI code that generates any configuration based on the environment, then the CLI code will think that APC isn't enabled. For example, when generating Symfony's DI container through the CLI, it will tell Doctrine not to use APC (details).
Also, I have not tested it but there's a chance APC may improve the speed of scripts for files included after a pcntl_fork(). Edit: I've asked the question about APC & pcntl_fork() here.
For completeness, to enable APC on the CLI (in Ubuntu):
echo 'apc.enable_cli = 1' > /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/enable-apc-cli.ini
Well, there's a good reason for APC in CLI Mode:
UnitTesting: I wanna do my unit test using an environment as close to the later production environment as possible. Zend Framework has an internal caching solution, which may use APC's Variable Cache as Storage Backend - and I wanna use this.
There is another reason to use it in CLI mode: some scripts are able to use it as a cache