A month ago, I went on a performance quest trying to optimize a PHP script that took 5 days to run. Together with the help of many talented developers, I eventually got it to run in under 30 seconds. This optimization process with so much fun, and so many people pitched in with their ideas; so I eventually decided I wanted to do something more.<p>That's why I built a performance challenge for the PHP community<p>The goal of this challenge is to parse 100 million rows of data with PHP, as efficiently as possible. The challenge will run for about two weeks, and at the end there are some prizes for the best entries (amongst the prize is the very sought-after PhpStorm Elephpant, of which we only have a handful left).<p>I hope people will have fun with it :)
Pitch this to whoever is in charge of performance at Wordpress.<p>A Wordpress instance will happily take over 20 seconds to fully load if you disable cache.
Wordpress is something that I cannot believe hasn't been displaced by a service that uses a separate application for editing and delivery.<p>It seems like something like vercel/cloudflare could host the content-side published as a worker for mostly-static content from a larger application and that would be more beneficial and run better with less risk, for that matter. Having the app editing and auth served from the same location is just begging for the issues WP and plugins have seen.
As someone who built full ecommerce websites on wordpress over 15 years ago, I can tell you exactly why it hasn't been replaced - the plugin/theme ecosystem.<p>There are tens of thousands of plugins and themes to make a Wordpress website do whatever you want and look however you want, either for free or a <i>very</i> low fee. You have to replace that entire ecosystem <i>for the same price</i> to replace Wordpress.<p>No matter how many times people get hacked, the perceived value of getting something for nothing outweighs the eventual cost.
Microbenchmarks are very different from optimizing performance in real applications in wide use though, they could do great on this specific benchmark but still have no clue about how to actually make something large like Wordpress to perform OK out of the box.
Are you talking about a new, empty WordPress instance running the default theme? Because if so, that doesn't match my anecdotal experience.<p>If you're talking about a WordPress instance with arbitrary plugins running an arbitrary theme, then sure — but that's an observation about those plugins and themes, not core.<p>As someone who has to work with WordPress, I have all kinds of issues with it, but "20 seconds to load core with caching disabled" isn't one of them.
Much like anything else your performance is going to vary a lot based on architecture of implementation. You really shouldn't deploying anything into production without some kind of caching. Whether that's done in the application itself or with memcached/redis or varnish or OPcache.
That's often a skill issue.
5 days to 30 seconds? What kind of factor/order of magnitude is that damn<p>What takes 5 days to run
<i>A month ago, I went on a performance quest trying to optimize a PHP script that took 5 days to run. Together with the help of many talented developers, I eventually got it to run in under 30 seconds.</i><p>When people say leetcode interviews are pointless I might share a link to this post. If that sort of optimization is possible there is a structures and algorithms problem in the background somewhere.
I find that these kind of optimizations are usually more about technical architecture than leetcode. Last time I got speedups this crazy the biggest win was reducing the number of network/database calls. There were also optimisations around reducing allocations and pulling expensive work out of hot loops. But leetcode interview questions don't tend to cover any of that.<p>They tend to be about the implementation details of specific algorithms and data structures. Whereas the important skill in most real-world scenarios would be to understand the trade-offs between different algorithms and data structures so that you pick an appropriate off-the-shelf implementation to use.
Well leetcode asks you to implement the data structure, not how and when to use which data structure. I don’t need to know how to implement a bloom filter on a whiteboard off the top of my head to know when to use it.
Using a language that is 100x slower than naive native programs to do a "speed challenge" is like spending your entire day speed walking to run errands when you can just learn how to drive a car.
> A month ago, I went on a performance quest trying to optimize a PHP script that took 5 days to run. Together with the help of many talented developers, I eventually got it to run in under 30 seconds<p>That's a huge improvement! How much was low hanging fruit unrelated to the PHP interpreter itself, out of curiosity? (E.g. parallelism, faster SQL queries etc)
Almost all, actually. I wrote about it here: <a href="https://stitcher.io/blog/11-million-rows-in-seconds" rel="nofollow">https://stitcher.io/blog/11-million-rows-in-seconds</a><p>A couple of things I did:<p>- Cursor based pagination
- Combining insert statements
- Using database transactions to prevent fsync calls
- Moving calculations from the database to PHP
- Avoiding serialization where possible
In general, it is bad practice to touch transaction datasets in php script space. Like all foot-guns it leads to Read-modify-write bugs eventually.<p>Depending on the SQL engine, there are many PHP Cursor optimizations that save moving around large chunks of data.<p>Clean cached PHP can be fast for REST transactional data parsing, but it is also often used as a bodge language by amateurs. PHP is not slow by default or meant to run persistently (low memory use is nice), but it still gets a lot of justified criticism.<p>Erlang and Elixir are much better for clients/host budgets, but less intuitive than PHP =3
exec(‘c program that does the parsing’);<p>Where do I get my prize? ;)
This is why I jumped from PHP to Go, then why I jumped from Go to Rust.<p>Go is the most battery-included language I've ever used. Instant compile times means I can run tests bound to ctrl/cmd+s every time I save the file. It's more performant (way less memory, similar CPU time) than C# or Java (and certainly all the scripting languages) and contains a massive stdlib for anything you could want to do. It's what scripting languages should have been. Anyone can read it just like Python.<p>Rust takes the last 20% I couldn't get in a GC language and removes it. Sure, it's syntax doesn't make sense to an outsider and you end up with 3rd party packages for a lot of things, but can't beat it's performance and safety. Removes a whole lot of tests as those situations just aren't possible.<p>If Rust scares you use Go. If Go scares you use Rust.
Can't speak for go... but for the handful of languages I've thrown at Claude Code, I'd say it's doing the best job with Rust. Maybe the Rust examples in the wild are just better compared to say C#, but I've had a much smoother time of it with Rust than anything else. TS has been decent though.
It's almost comical how often bring up Rust. "Here's a fun PHP challange!" "Let's talk about Rust..."
Sorry, but it's honestly just a lot of our journeys. Started on scripting languages like PHP/Ruby/Lua (self-taught) or Java/VB/C#/Python (collage) and then slowly expanded to other languages as we realized we were being held back by our own tools. Each new language/relationship makes you kick yourself for putting up with things so long.
I don't know about that... I like Rust a lot... but I also like a lot of things about C# or TS/JS... I'll still reach for TS first (Deno) for most things, including shell scripting.
I understand that but there's a time and a place. Rust has nothing to do with this. 100% of the people on this site understand that this challenge can be done faster in C, or Rust, or whatever. This is a PHP challenge. Perhaps we could discuss the actual submission as opposed to immediately derailing it.
I am not that smart to use Rust so take it with a grain of salt. However, its syntax just makes me go crazy. Go/Golang on the other hand is a breath of fresh air. I think unless you really need that additional 20% improvement that Rust provides, Go should be the default for most projects between the 2.
I hear you, advanced generics (for complex unions and such) with TypeScript and Rust are honestly unreadable. It's code you spend a day getting right and then no one touches it.<p>I'm just glad modern languages stopped throwing and catching exceptions at random levels in their call chain. PHP, JavaScript and Java can (not always) have unreadable error handling paths not to mention hardly augmenting the error with any useful information and you're left relying on the stack trace to try to piece together what happened.
Side note - I wasn't aware that there is active collectors scene for Elephpants, awesome!<p><a href="https://elephpant.me/" rel="nofollow">https://elephpant.me/</a>
Elephpants should be for second and third place. First place should be the double-clawed hammer.
Excellent project. My favorites: the joker, php storm, phplashy, Molly.
Are they just confused about what characters require escaping in JSON strings or is PHP weirder than I remember?<p><pre><code> {
"\/blog\/11-million-rows-in-seconds": {
"2025-01-24": 1,
"2026-01-24": 2
},
"\/blog\/php-enums": {
"2024-01-24": 1
}
}</code></pre>
PHP has always escaped forward slashes to help prevent malicious JSON from injecting tags into JavaScript I believe. Because it was common for PHP users to json_encode some data and then to write it out into the HTML in a script tag. A malicious actor could include a closing script tag, and then could inject their own HTML tags and scripts etc.
The weirdness is partly in JSON . In the JSON spec, the slash (named "solidus" there) is the only character that can be written plainly or prefixed with a backslash (AKA "reverse solidus").<p>See page 4, section 9 of the latest ECMA for JSON: <a href="https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-404_2nd_edition_december_2017.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-404_2...</a>
That's the default output when using json_encode with the JSON_PRETTY_PRINT flag in php.
> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.<p>So apparently that is what they consider "pretty JSON". I really don't want to see what they would consider "ugly JSON".<p>(I think the term they may have been looking for is "pretty-printed JSON" which implies something about the formatting rather than being a completely subjective term)
> Also, the generator will use a seeded randomizer so that, for local development, you work on the same dataset as others<p>Except that the generator script generates dates relative to time() ?
Tempted to submit a Java app wrapped in PHP exec() :D
How large is a sample 100M row file in bytes? (I tried to run the generator locally but my php is not bleeding-edge enough)
Obligatory DuckDB solution:<p>> duckdb -s "COPY (SELECT url[20:] as url, date, count(*) as c FROM read_csv('data.csv', columns = { 'url': 'VARCHAR', 'date': 'DATE' }) GROUP BY url, date) TO 'output.json' (ARRAY)"<p>Takes about 8 seconds on my M1 Macbook. JSON not in the right format, but that wouldn't dominate the execution time.
> The output should be encoded as a pretty JSON string.<p>...<p>> Your parser should store the following output in $outputPath as a JSON file:<p><pre><code> {
"\/blog\/11-million-rows-in-seconds": {
"2025-01-24": 1,
"2026-01-24": 2
},
"\/blog\/php-enums": {
"2024-01-24": 1
}
}
</code></pre>
They don't define what exactly "pretty" means, but superflous escapes are not very pretty in my opinion.
Awesome. I’ll be following this. I’ll probably learn a ton.
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