WordPress Meetup Tokyo -- WordPress Server Optimization

I recently gave a quick talk about how I use Nginx, HHVM, MariaDB with WordPress on this blog at the March WordPress Meetup in Tokyo. Here are the slides:

I’ve published a Vagrant template for the setup detailed in the slides.

HHVM and WordPress

February 9, 2014

Update 2014/4/17: This site now runs WordPress 3.9, which seems to be working fine with HHVM. Also, compatibility has improved, thanks to a patch in the WordPress core specifically for HHVM.

I recently posted about how I switched out PHP-FPM (PHP’s FastCGI pool) for HHVM. Today I’ll be talking more about the install process on the server, and using it to set up WordPress.

What is HHVM?

This is usually what happens in a (successful) startup[footnote]Twitter is (in)famous for its use of Ruby on Rails, which eventually had to be re-written in Scala, a language that runs on the JVM.[/footnote]:

Becoming a better PHP developer

August 7, 2012

There’s no denying that PHP is not the optimal language. But at least code in good PHP. Here’s my pet peeve for the day:

Relative paths in include(_once)? or require(_once)? statements.

// WRONG
require_once("./include_me.php");
// RIGHT
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . "/include_me.php");

Why? Basically, performance. PHP doesn’t look through all its search paths for absolute paths, saving those precious system calls. This effect is compounded when you’re using the APC cache with apc.stat = 0 (it won’t even cache files that are referred to with a relative path)