ReadWriteEnterprise

Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost.

Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they're taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production.

The influence that Facebook is having on the enterprise now goes beyond making the corporate world a more Web-oriented place - its impact now goes deep into the code.

Facebook announced this week that it has rewritten the PHP runtime, translating it to C++ (a more machine-readable language) which is then compiled with g++. This is no small feat. Facebook engineer Haiping Zhao said that the rewrite significantly reduced the CPU usage on its Web servers by an average of about 50% depending on the page

The impact of this development on the enterprise will depend on a few factors: