Beta Features/PHP7
 | This page is obsolete. It is being retained for archival purposes. It may document extensions or features that are obsolete and/or no longer supported. Do not rely on the information here being up-to-date. |
The Wikimedia Foundation has been employing HHVM to run MediaWiki in production since 2014.[1] Since then, a few things happened that made it compelling for us to move back to the "official" PHP interpreter:
- PHP 7.x has brought huge performance improvements, so that its performance is nowadays comparable to, if not better than, HHVM for our needs.[2][3]
- HHVM has dropped support for pure PHP in favour of Hack, an "evolution" of PHP which does not have widespread support.[4]
The Wikimedia Foundation is moving all Wikimedia wikis to use PHP7 in 2019.[5] PHP7 was available as a Beta Feature from January until May 2019.[6]
Replacing the Beta Feature, since March 2019 a percentage of all production traffic has been randomly assigned to use PHP instead of HHVM.
You can verify that it is enabled for you by visiting Special:Version on your wiki, and checking that it says "php" instead of "HHVM" in the "Installed software" table.
Questions and answers
[edit]I am a non-technical user. What does this mean?
[edit]Hopefully nothing. This is about changing the software used to run the wiki's code. Ideally, you should notice no real difference.
When will this happen?
[edit]Work began in 2017 and ramped up over 2018. The beta feature was available from January until May 2019, and PHP 7 support should be production-complete in the first half of 2019.
What should I do if I find an issue?
[edit]Report it on Phabricator, in the PHP 7.2 support project.
Why are edits being tagged?
[edit]This will help us identify performance, functional, and stability concerns specific to PHP in comparison to HHVM. You can ignore the PHP7 tags.
References
[edit]- ↑ Giuseppe Lavagetto (December 3, 2014), Wikitech-l All non-api traffic is now served by HHVM Wikimedia Foundation.
- ↑ Evaluate scalability and performance of PHP7 compared to HHVM Wikimedia Foundation.
- ↑ Tim Starling (September 20, 2017), Wikitech-l HHVM vs. Zend divergence Wikimedia Foundation.
- ↑ Max Wang (September 18, 2017), The Future of HHVM HHVM.
- ↑ Migrate to PHP 7 in WMF production Wikimedia Foundation.
- ↑ Giuseppe Lavagetto (January 28, 2019), Wikitech-l PHP 7 is now a beta feature Wikimedia Foundation.