Icecat Upgrades to PHP 7.4

PHP 7.4 has been made generally available in November 2019 and end of February we went live with this upgrade. Together with nice features like strict types, we are expecting a performance boost from the upgrade from the legacy PHP 5.x version that we were running.

The whole set of preparational activities for this move has started six months ago. As we run lot of code, and a lot of it is ran in a distributed, asynchronous way, it took us quite some time to test everything and get fully prepared for the move.

What it has effectively brought us besides promises? Pretty much, actually!

Performance Results

Below you can see the % of CPU load on some of our servers before and after the rollout.

We estimate the overall win to be a 30% to 40% performance boost.

Further, we ran some synthetic tests, and that also brought us some interesting metrics, visible in the graph above. Some performance gains are ranging from 160% to 430% (!), meaning that we can do 1.6x to 4.3 times more tasks in the same computer time.

Migrate to PHP 7.4

If you work with PHP, we advice you to make sure to run the latest PHP version as well, to use strict types, and to make sure that you test your applications well before going to production with the new PHP version! :)