Proving Performance: A Live Demo of Upgrading a Drupal App with PHP 7

akakran

Please give us a detailed overview of your session and why attendees will be excited to hear about it.  

Enough has been said about the performance upgrade brought with PHP 7. Now it’s time to show it. Live. Where I work at AppNeta we’ve done some testing and wanted to show the crowd the impact of updating to PHP 7 on Drupal 8 live. I will start with a simple Drupal 8/ PHP 5.9 app, and go through a live update to PHP 7 with a focus on end user request latency - showing the ease of upgrade, as well as the impact of the upgrade at every step.

Setup

I’ll first walk through the setup of the app and what components have already been created. While simple, there are a few pieces I’ll need to mention including the software I’m using to monitor latency, perform the load testing (for benchmarking) and generate synthetic traffic (for continuous monitoring). This will include a discussion on the performance metrics we’re tracking like requests per second; time per request and the current (PHP 5.9) values.

Upgrade

Starting with the server, we’ll upgrade to the latest distribution of PHP 7 live using Ondrej Sury’s ppa for PHP 7 and perform diagnostics on the install to ensure success - the endpoints are accessible and performant.

Aftermath

I’ll discuss and show the latency increases over time and highlight the drop in latency during the upgrade - focusing on end user experience as well as making sure that the audience understands and can replicate my tests.

Attendees will want to have at least a basic understanding of:

  • Drupal applications and how to set them up

  • Performance monitoring of latency in web apps

  • Load testing

Attendees will walk away with:

  • The performance gains of Drupal apps when upgrading to PHP 7

  • A simple tutorial of how to upgrade to PHP 7

        

Register NOW

Session Track

PHP

Experience Level

Intermediate

Drupal Version