The HHVM blog has a new post today sharing the results of their first open source lockdown. During this time they worked to improve not only HHVM itself but how well it supports other open source projects using it as a platform.

The HHVM team has concluded its first ever open source performance lockdown, and we’re very excited to share the results with you. During our two week lockdown, we’ve made strides optimizing builtin functions, dynamic properties, string concatenation, and the file cache. In addition to improving HHVM, we also looked for places in the open source frameworks where we could contribute patches that would benefit all engines. Our efforts centered around maximizing requests per second (RPS) with WordPress, Drupal 7, and MediaWiki, using our oss-performance benchmarking tool.

They share some of the benchmark improvements made by the updates during the session including performance boosts for WordPress & MediaWiki. They also talk about the community involvement during the event and updates made to their own tooling too. The post then spends some time talking about their methodology on development and testing during the lockdown and how the results compare pre- and post-lockdown. The remainder of the post looks at some more specific issues and covers a few technical notes about software used and how the results were reported.

Time are getting tough out there - a recession is coming around and companies all over are feeling the impact. People are looking for places to save money without having to compromise on functionality and quality. Larger numbers are turning to Open Source communities to provide solutions to fill that gap. Stefan Koopmanschap looks at this trend in his most recent blog post.

As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?

Stefan talks about Enterprise resources and their shift in needs away from the "vanity projects" and more into the day-to-day, stable clients. Open Source is giving them a bit of that "fun" back in and allowing them to do more with less - little to no licensing, no vendor lockdown, etc.