By the Code. editorial team
In case you missed it, Box announced this week that it has rolled out HHVM — the open source runtime for Hack and PHP — to its servers and is seeing incredible results. And Box isn’t the only one. Etsy announced its own adoption of HHVM last week, and Wikipedia worked with our teams to adopt earlier this year. Here’s a little bit about how each company has experienced the transition, in the words of the engineers involved.
Box
Box writes about great gains achieved with HHVM on their engineering blog:
Looking past the latency benefit, HHVM also comes with a huge cost benefit for us right out of the gate! Since the completion of the migration, the overall CPU utilization on servers running Box’s PHP application has been cut in half.
Read more about Box’s experience transitioning to HHVM here.
Etsy
In Etsy’s Code as Craft blog, an Etsy platform engineer sums up a thorough examination of how the company utilized HHVM:
HHVM met our expectations. We were able to realize a greater throughput on our API cluster, as well as improved performance. Buying fewer servers also means less waste and less power consumption in our data centers.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s adoption happened earlier this year. One of Facebook’s HHVM engineers, Brett Simmers, documented the effort. Saving time was notably improved, as seen in this graph: Editors could get results after previews or edits about 2x as fast as before.
