In this new post to thier blog Kinsta shares benchmark results comparing PHP 7 to HHVM, both in their own experience and some shared from other companies too.

A few years ago, engineers at Facebook went on a swashbuckling mission to rebuild the foundation of the world’s most populated social network struggling to sustain acceptable performance levels. PHP was all the rage a decade ago when Facebook was gaining steam and pursuing a global target audience.

As they put it the "competition is getting closer" and the performance gap between the two is growing smaller and smaller. They talk some about the performance improvements and new features that are being worked into PHP 7 and some speculations around a Just-In-Time engine and asynchronous programming features. Then comes the benchmarks. They provide the specifications of the machine they tested on and the results of tests runs of WordPress and Drupal (based on requests per second). The rest of the article talks about two stories from other companies using HHVM, Etsy and WikiMedia, and some of the lessons that have been learned along the way.

On the Etsy "Code as Craft" blog they've posted an article about their experiences in experimenting with HHVM at Etsy and some of the differences it makes.

In 2014 Etsy’s infrastructure group took on a big challenge: scale Etsy’s API traffic capacity 20X. We launched many efforts simultaneously to meet the challenge, including a migration to HHVM after it showed a promising increase in throughput. Getting our code to run on HHVM was relatively easy, but we encountered many surprises as we gained confidence in the new architecture.

They start with a brief overview of what HHVM is for those that aren't sure and talk about where their focus was in these experiments. They list out some of the main reasons for trying out HHVM and the role of concurrency in their current application. They started with the "minimum viable product" and compared benchmarks between PHP 5.4 and HHVM on several endpoints. They also show how they "teed" incoming requests to both servers to ensure that the responses were the same across both. They also talk about using employee-only traffic and the overall statistics for when they released the HHVM version internally. They also talk about some of the undocumented features to keep an eye out for if you're thinking of switching: "warming up" the requests to align them in JIT memory, using perf(1) for profiling and the use of the HHVM interactive debugger (hphpd).

Over on the PC World site, there's a new article posted about Etsy and its development practices and how it "grows in a unique fashion" because of them.

The Etsy staffers are also completely serious about their work, and these two features they share in common with their customer base, who are tying to earn side money, if not pay the rent, by designing the hand bags, walking sticks and hand-made chocolates that have made Etsy famous in the artisan and sustainable business scene. [...] The quality model for Etsy is cutting edge, but not unique. New developers are expected to push code to production on day one. That's not commit code, but push it to production.

The article gets into some of the technology they use there at Etsy (including NodeJS, Nagios and, of course, PHP), the atmosphere they try to maintain, how they do their code deployment and how they conform to various regulations, security and privacy concerns.

In the latest episode of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series, Elizabeth Naramore (of Engine Yard/Orchestra.io) interviews Laura Beth Denker, and Anthropologist of Developer Culture at Etsy).

They talk about one of Laura Beth's passions (software testing), what her role means there at Etsy, their "startup culture" and how they handle deployment and code reviews.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page playerdownloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

As a new meme was launched at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and, while it's not directly related to PHP, it was still very warmly accepted by the community - Christian Flickinger's "Fails" logos (see here). He's written up a post about it for his blog too:

So, a week before PHP|TEK 2008 I came up with the genius idea to take the Ruby on Rails logo, which is protected against re-use (hahaha), and parody it. I wanted to express my views of Ruby on Rails (though never have using RoR) through this modification.

I took the logo and simply changed the "R" to an "F" using a font that was almost identical to the original.

You can ask anyone that was at ZendCon this year about them - they were everywhere. Christian did a great job on a simple parody that shares the sentiment of many members of the PHP community (and others outside I'm sure). He has them for sale on his etsy shop if you'd like to pick up some of your own.