Scalability and Performance Best

Practices

Laura Thomson
OmniTI
laura@omniti.com

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Standing in for George

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 Scalability vs. Performance

Scalability: Ability to gracefully handle

additional traffic while maintaining
service quality.
Performance: Ability to execute a single
task quickly.

Often linked, not the same.

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 Why are Scalability and
Performance Important?
No hope of growth otherwise.
Scalability means you can handle
service commitments of the future.
Performance means you can handle the
service commitments of today.
Both act symbiotically to mean cost-
efficient growth.

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 Why PHP?

PHP is a completely runtime language

Compiled, statically typed languages are
faster.
BUT:
– Scalability is (almost) never a factor of the
language you use
– Most bottlenecks are not in user code
– PHP’s heavy lifting is done in C
– PHP is fast to learn
– PHP is fast to write
– PHP is easy to extend
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 When to Start

Premature optimization is the root of all evil – Donald

Knuth

Without direction and goals, your code

will only get more obtuse with little
hope of actual improvement in
scalability or speed.
Design for refactoring, so that when you
need to make changes, you can.
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 Knowing When to Stop

Optimizations get exponentially more

expensive as they are accrued.
Strike a balance between performance,
scalability and features.
Unless you ship, all the speed in the
world is meaningless.

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 No Fast = True

Optimization takes effort.

Some are easier than others, but no
silver bullet.
Be prepared to get your hands dirty.

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 General Best Practices

1. Profile early, profile often.

2. Dev-ops cooperation is essential.
3. Test on production data.
4. Track and trend.
5. Assumptions will burn you.

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 Scalability Best Practices

1. Decouple.
2. Cache.
3. Federate.
4. Replicate.
5. Avoid straining hard-to-scale
resources.

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 Performance Best Practices

1. Use a compiler cache.

2. Be mindful of using external data
sources.
3. Avoid recursive or heavy looping
code.
4. Don’t try to outsmart PHP.
5. Build with caching in mind.

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 1. Profiling

Pick a profiling tool and learn it in and out.

– APD, XDebug, Zend Platform
Learn your system profiling tools
– strace, dtrace, ltrace
Effective debugging profiling is about spotting
deviations from the norm.
Effective habitual profiling is about making
the norm better.
Practice, practice, practice.

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 2. Dev-Ops Cooperation

The most critical difference in organizations that

handles crises well.
Production problems are time-critical and usually
hard to diagnose.
Build team unity before emergencies happen.
Operations staff should provide feedback on behavior
changes when code is pushed live.
Development staff must heed warnings from
operations staff.
Established code launch windows, developer
escalation procedures, and fallback plans are very
helpful.

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 3. Test on Production(-ish) Data

Code behavior (especially performance)

is often data driven.
Using data that looks like production
data will minimize surprises.
Having a QA environment that
simulates production load on all
components will highlight problems
before they occur.

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 4. Track and Trend

Understanding your historical

performance characteristics is
essential for spotting emerging
problems.
– Access logs (with hi-res timings)
– System metrics
– Application and query profiling data

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 Access log timings

Apache 2 natively supports hi-res

timings
For Apache 1.3 you’ll need to patch it
(timings in seconds = not very useful)

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 5. When you assume…

Systems are complex and often break in

unexpected ways.
If you knew how your system was
broken, you probably would have
designed it better in the first place.
Confirming your suspicions is almost
always cheaper than acting on them.
Time is your most precious commodity.
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 6. Decouple

Isolate performance failures.

Put refactoring time only where needed.
Put hardware only where needed.
Impairs your ability to efficiently join
two decoupled application data sets.

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 Example:
Static versus dynamic content
Apache + PHP is fast for dynamic
content
Waste of resources to serve static
content from here: images, CSS,
JavaScript
Move static content to a separate faster
solution for static content e.g. lighttpd
on a separate box -> on a
geographically distributed CDN
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 Example: Session data

Using the default session store limits

scale out
Decouple session data by putting it
elsewhere:
– In a database
– In a distributed cache
– In cookies

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 7. Cache

Caching is the core of most optimizations.

Fundamental question is: how dynamic does this bit
have to be.
Many levels of caching
– Algorithmic
– Data
– Page/Component
Good technologies out there:
– APC (local data)
– Memcache (distributed data)
– Squid (distributed page/component/data)
– Bespoke

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 Caching examples

Compiler cache (APC or Zend)

MySQL query cache (tune and use
where possible)
Cache generated pages or iframes (disk
or memcache)
Cache calculated data, datasets, page
fragments (memcache)
Cache static content (squid)
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 8. Federate

Data federation is taking a single data set and

spreading it across multiple
database/application servers.
Great technique for scaling data.
Does not inherently promote data reliability.
Reduces your ability to join within the data
set.
Increases overall internal connection
establishment rate.

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 9. Replicate

Replication is making synchronized

copies of data available in more than
one place.
Useful scaling technique, very popular
in ‘modern’ PHP architectures.
Mostly usable for read-only data.
High write rates can make it difficult to
keep slaves in sync.
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 Problems

On the slave, you should see two threads

running: an I/O thread, that reads data from
the master, and an SQL thread, that
updates the replicated tables.
(You can see these with SHOW PROCESSLIST)
Since updates on the master occur in
*multiple* threads, and on the slave in a
*single* thread, the updates on the slave
take longer.
Slaves have to use a single SQL thread to
make sure queries are executed in the
same order as on the master
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The more writes you do, the more likely
the slaves are to get behind, and the
further behind they will get.
At a certain point the only solution is to
stop the slave and re-image from the
master.
Or use a different solution: multi
master, federation, split architectures
between replication and federation,
etc
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 Other uses of replication

Remember replication has other uses

than scale out
Failover
Backups

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 10. Avoid Straining Hard-to-
Scale Resources
Some resources are inherently hard to scale
– ‘Uncacheable’ data
– Data with a very high read+write rate
– Non-federatable data
– Data in a black-box
Be aware of these limitations and be extra
careful with these resources.
Try and poke holes in the assumptions about
why the data is hard to manage.

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 11. Compiler Cache

PHP natively reparses a script and its

includes whenever it executes it.
This is wasteful and a huge overhead.
A compiler cache sits inside the engine
and caches the parsed optrees.
The closest thing to ‘fast = true’
In PHP5 the real alternatives are APC
and Zend Platform.
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 12. Xenodataphobia

External data (RDBMS, App Server, 3rd

Party data feeds) are the number one
cause of application bottlenecks.
Minimize and optimize your queries.
3rd Party data feeds/transfers are
unmanageable. Do what you can to
take them out of the critical path.

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 Managing external data and
services
Cache it (beware of AUPs for APIs)

Load it dynamically
(iframes/XMLHttpRequest)

Batch writes

Ask how critical the data is to your app.

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 Query tuning

Query tuning is like PHP tuning: what you

think is slow may not be slow.
Benchmarking is the only way to truly test
this.
When tuning, change one thing at a time
Your toolkit:
– EXPLAIN
– Slow Query Log
– mytop
– Innotop
– Query profilers
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 Indexing problems

Lack of appropriate indexing

Create relevant indexes. Make sure
your queries use them. (EXPLAIN is
your friend here.)
The order of multi-column indexes is
important
Remove unused indexes to speed writes

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 Schema design (MySQL)

Use the smallest data type possible

Use fixed width rows where possible (prefer
char over varchar: disk is cheap)
Denormalize where necessary
Take static data out of the database or use
MEMORY tables
Use the appropriate storage engine for each
table

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 Queries

Minimizing the number of queries is always a good

start. Web pages that need to make 70-80 queries
to be rendered need a different strategy:
– Cache the output
– Cache part of the output
– Redesign your schema so you can reduce the number of
queries
– Decide if you can live without some of these queries.
Confirm that your queries are using the indexes you
think that they are
Avoid correlated subqueries where possible
Stored procedures are notably faster

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 13. Be Lazy

Deeply recursive code is expensive in

PHP.
Heavy manual looping usually indicates
that you are doing something wrong.
Learn PHP’s idioms for dealing with
large data sets or parsing/packing
data.

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 14. Don’t Outsmart Yourself

Don’t try to work around perceived inefficiencies in

PHP (at least not in userspace code!)
Common bad examples here include:
– Writing parsers in PHP that could be done with a simple
regex.
– Trying to circumvent connection management in
networking/database libraries.
– Performing complex serializations that could be done with
internal extensions.
– Calling out to external executables when a PHP extension
can give you the same information.
– Reimplementing something that already exists in PHP

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 15. Caching

Mentioned before, but deserves a

second slide: caching is the most
important tool in your tool box.
For frequently accessed information,
even a short cache lifespan can be
productive.
Watch your cache hit rates. A non-
effective cache is worse than no
cache.
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 Thanks!

There are longer versions of this talk at

http://omniti.com/~george/talks/
There are good books on these topics as well:
– Advanced PHP Programming, G. Schlossnagle
– Building Scalable Web Sites, C. Henderson
– Scalable Internet Architectures, T. Schlossnagle
Compulsory plug: OmniTI is hiring for a
number of positions (PHP, Perl, C, UI design)
http://omniti.com/careers

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