Php 7

[WagerPod]

Anybody switched over yet? This is meant to delivery pretty nifty speed gains for Wordpress.

For those of you who don't know about PHP 7, basically its a new version taking over from 5.6 (I believe). It's meant to have massive speed gains and is backwards compatible, not many hosts using it just yet but it's going to be taking off I imagine.

There has also been a lot of movement with Maria DB if anybody is using SQL - if anybody has made the switch for performance gains?

[Doolally]

I've moved some Wordpress stuff over to Php 7. It works fine, no problems. I haven't really noticed any difference but to be honest, haven't monitored any speeds to tell if it's better or not.

[universal4]

I have been reading about it but have not yet tried it.

The builds I would be using have been built with Visual Studio 2015 and claim to have improved both performance and stability, but I have not found much more detail on those claims.

Personally I have not seen any performance or stability issues with the 5.5.xx or 5.6.xx builds, but even minor performance improvements that are hard to detect on a single site could certainly make a different in the long term.

Maybe I will throw something up on the rack to test it.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

One concern I have is here
http://php.net/manual/en/migration70...exts-sapis.php

I have read on stack exchange and a few other places that this can break sites, and obviously anyone that has written some of their own code should tread carefully.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...n-in-wordpress

I am not sure yet if the following means it is most likely ok if you are using the latest versions of wordpress.

This has nothing to do with WordPress since it will automatically try to use MySQLi when MySQL is not found. At least in WP 4.4.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

Anyone running Joomla may want to look at this, I am not very familiar with joomla setups so not sure if this will have an effect.
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=921958

For anyone using IIS or wanting to develop or test at home on IIS/PWS, I do see that php7 is now a choice when searching for php using the WPI(web platform installer)
Even though it is not listed here
https://www.microsoft.com/web/platfo...onwindows.aspx

For those that normally install manually, you can find the binaries here
http://windows.php.net/download/

For IIS you would normally want the non-thread safe install, and you obviously want to make sure you have fast cgi installed and enabled.

Rick
Universal4

[dfiocch]

I'm doing some tests on a test-site (other server than main site). For now, nothing "exceptional" to report.
However, working around with PHP7 and MySqli I can see a "slight" performance increase on quite-complex queries.

I will keep you updated.

[universal4]

That is good to know for developers for sure.

If performance improvements are seen on complex queries as you say, there are likely overall performance enhancements that will make a difference on site speed on VPS's and shared hosting environments.

Rick
Universal4

[WagerPod]

I've finally got round to this (I've been using my pet project site as a tester, freebie.bet).

It's an out of the box theme and Wordpress installation so not much demand on resources but I've seen some pretty decent gains with benchmarking.

I've rolled out PHP 7 along with switching from MySQL to MariaDB. Them two switches alone have dropped my benchmark load times by around 35% without optimising the on-site elements too much.

[wonderpunter]

I've finally got round to this (I've been using my pet project site as a tester, freebie.bet).

It's an out of the box theme and Wordpress installation so not much demand on resources but I've seen some pretty decent gains with benchmarking.

I've rolled out PHP 7 along with switching from MySQL to MariaDB. Them two switches alone have dropped my benchmark load times by around 35% without optimising the on-site elements too much.

I spoke with my host about migrating, they said it was too unstable for use.. the site you mentioned has nothing on there as of yet, will you be testing with a larger site? something with plenty of process running? thats something i would like to see.. I only just upgraded to 5.6 as my site is pretty intensive and was having memory issues

[DanHorvat]

I used another simple site for testing, www.freebets.ws, and the mean loading time (60 tests) was 905ms with PHP 5.3.3 and when I switched to PHP 7.0.8 it dropped to 399ms for a 56% reduction.

Not sure what to think.

[WagerPod]

PHP 7 is backwards compatible - normally when they say this it's not always the case and often requires some tweaking. I'm using 7.0.8 so it's pretty stable.

Ive only ran this on an empty site to see what the leg work was and it was pretty easy (it was a fresh Ubuntu server). Can't say that php 7 was the reason for the uplift or mariadb

ive got a much more complex site I'm looking at migrating will update this when complete

[allfreechips]

would like to run speed tests, ill have to see if any of my shared hosts have 7 available.

[allfreechips]

1and1 i can switch back and forth per site so ill play ang get some numbers this week

[wiitigoo]

We're testing PHP7, especially because I read about speed gains for WP sites. So far we don't see any difference worth mentioning. We are going to upgrade anyway but there is no rush for us.