Confessions of the Professions Is All About Speed Through HipHop Virtual Machine
May 25, 2015 – Confessions of the Professions is always looking for ways to improve its speed to become one of the fastest websites on the Internet, all without sacrificing performance, while delivering quality articles and a great quantity of uniquely written articles. We are constantly looking for new ways to improve our website speed to deliver you fast content. We believe that websites should be instant and do our best to deliver that belief. We have found yet another way to improve the speed of our website: HHVM.
HHVM, also known as HipHop Virtual Machine, is an open-source process virtual machine, written by developers at Facebook, and based on a JIT (just-in-time) compilation, which serves as an execution engine and is designed to improve the performance of PHP and Hack code. Facebook developed this code to improve their own performance and improve the efficiency of their servers, which ran on PHP, as the demand and increasing number of Facebook users called for it. While the original code pre-compiled all PHP code into C++ code, it now compiles it as it runs through each line, improving the performance of the overall code.
HHVM works by compiling PHP code into high level bytecode, which then gets translated into machine code, and finally it gets ran by the JIT compiler. To break it down:
- Bytecode: non-human readable code designed for efficient execution.
- Machine code: Set of instructions designed to be executed by the CPU.
- JIT (just-in-time) compiler: compiles bytecode during execution, stores it in memory, and once it gets ran, compiles and executes as many sections as are needed to run for execution.
The original code is kept as PHP and HHVM converts that PHP code for optimal speed performance. For more information, read the official HHVM website. Since this website runs on a PHP platform, it was swapped to run on HHVM instead without issues. The new platform is still in beta, but we have yet to encounter any issues as of yet.
Confessions of the Professions currently stands at around a one and a quarter second load time.
Our fastest time from Pingdom Tools:
This specific test was done on May 24 at 00:46:41 from unknown. The web page took 1.25 s to load, used 79 requests, and weighed in at 571.5 kB.
Confessions of the Professions uses several caching techniques including Varnish Cache, Google Pagespeed, WP Super Cache, code optimization, database optimization, and HHVM to deliver the overall website and webpages to our visitors as immediately as possible. We don’t like to wait for websites to load and we know you probably feel the same way too. We are always working with code and optimization techniques to continue to improve our website for maximum speed and performance.
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