Re: Which OSs and SAPI should PHP 5.6 support?

On 20/08/13 16:50, Johannes Schlüter wrote:

<snip> Terry Ellison wrote:

PHP (unlike some language alternatives) seems to be doing little to improve general performance, and the discussions related to performance on this DL are almost non-existent.

Looking at any benchmark from 5.2 to 5.3 to 5.4 and 5.5 shows notable improvements (5.4 to 5.5 maybe not as much as the others) saying we do little is a bit misleading. But well, it is simpler to do these syntax sugar things we're bikeshedding about than doing actual core improvements. We have just very few people fully understanding the engine and being able to improve it. So such discussions gain no traction. I apologise if this sounded as unreasonably critical, as this wasn't my intent. As it happens, my particular interest is in PHP performance and I've got a good understanding of the Zend Engine and opcache, but trying to work out how I can contribute effectively to this is difficult for me given this lack of traction.

I also know that Dmitry and you guys made some fundamental improvements to the 5.4 engine that significantly dropped the op_array sizing and lead to perhaps an overall 5-15% performance improvement. I discussed this in some depth on my OPcache documentation on this page: https://github.com/TerryE/opcache/wiki/The-Zend-Engine-and-opcode-caching#wiki-Comments_on_Zend_engine_performance However, I don't think that this is appreciated in the wider PHP community (for example I can't recall it ever being discussed or emphasised on StackOverflow). I feel that it got lost in the reaction to APC not working reliably with the early 5.4 dot releases. Regards Terry