Watch the webinar on demand: https://www.nginx.com/resources/webinars/maximize-php-performance-with-nginx Is your PHP app slowing to a crawl? PHP is a powerful programming language that powers roughly 80% of the internet, but it’s unfortunately subject to performance problems – as we all know. Luckily, for thousands of PHP-based applications, some relatively simple changes can lead to noticeable improvements in performance. NGINX has greatly improved application performance for more than 150 million sites in production today. Using NGINX greatly improves the performance of PHP apps with features such as caching, load balancing, HTTP/2 support, and more, included in open source NGINX software and in our commercial-grade application delivery platform NGINX Plus.

1. Maximizing PHP
Performance with
NGINX
Wednesday, 30 March 2016

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Your Questions
1. Who are we?
● Floyd Smith, Technical Marketing Writer. Author of NGINX blog posts, “Maximizing PHP 7
Performance with NGINX”, Part I and Part II.
● Faisal Memon, Product Marketer. Author of blog posts on load balancing, containers,
cloud, microservices and more.
2. What’s new in PHP 7?
3. How can I implement a high-performance site?
4. How do NGINX and NGINX Plus fit into my efforts?

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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The Trouble with Updates

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What’s New in PHP 7
1. Higher performance – PHP 7 is said to be roughly 50% faster than previous versions of
PHP, due to core refactoring introduced in the phpng (“PHP next-gen”) RFC. The same
servercan serve more users because tasks get done faster.
2. Significant reductions in memory usage – More users can be served before a server
starts paging to disk, which results in slowdowns and crashes.
1. Near-perfect compatibility – Look for changes in expression evaluation (such as for
variable variables and variable properties), removal of ASP and script tags, and complete
removal of formerly deprecated functionality.
2. New language features – Combined comparison operator (<=>, the “spaceship operator”),
null coalesce operator (??), scalar type hints with strict mode, and return type hints with
strict mode.
3. Security concerns – Performance and memory improvements reduce security
vulnerabilities, but cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLi) vulnerabilities are still
commonly found in PHP code.

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PHP 7 vs. PHP 5 vs. HHVM
Source: talks.php.net/fluent15#/wpbench

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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Single-Server Performance Fixes
1. Upgrade to PHP 7 – As described, results in faster app performance, reduced memory
footprint, new language features.
2. Refactor your code – PHP 7 is 50% faster . How much faster can your code be? Moving to
microservices makes a huge difference to single-server and multiserver performance.
3. Replace the web server with NGINX – Can use open source NGINX (free, widely used) or
NGINX Plus (pre-built releases, support, monitoring and management, etc.).
1. Scale up – Get a bigger, stronger, faster machine or VM instance to run your application
server on.
2. Use a CDN – Use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve disk performance.
3. More? – Please add suggestions for later discussion.

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Replacing Your Web Server
1. Replace Apache with NGINX or NGINX Plus – Immediate performance fix. Enables
caching for static and dynamic content. (More on this soon.) Does not enable multiple app
servers.
2. More performance on same hardware – Event loop replaces thread-per-connection,
solves C10K problem.
3. Requires new server configuration – Replace
familiar Apache configuration with tighter, more
efficient (IMHO) NGINX configuration.
4. Independent of NGINX as reverse proxy
server – You can use NGINX as a reverse
proxy server with or without using NGINX
as your web server; very flexible.

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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Planning Your Site Architecture
1. Current architecture – Evaluate your current site traffic and performance.
2. Goals – Immediate problems, future growth.
3. Estimate impact of changes – Open source NGINX or NGINX Plus as web server, reverse
proxy server, load balancer, more.
4. Plan for growth – Estimate likely and possible growth and speed of growth.
5. Factor in the cloud – Use cloud from scratch, expand into the cloud, move into the cloud.

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7-Specific NGINX Changes
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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PHP 7-Specific Changes
upstream php-handler {
server unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
upstream php-handler {
server unix:/var/run/php7.0-fpm.sock;
}
PHP 5
PHP 7.0

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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Why Cache with NGINX?
Source: http://bbc.in/1O8qHbi

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Microcaching with NGINX
• Cache content for a short time, as little as 1 second
• Site content is out of date for max 1 second
• Significant performance gains even for that short of a time

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Microcaching with NGINX
proxy_cache_path /tmp/cache keys_zone=cache:10m levels=1:2
inactive=600s max_size=100m;
server {
proxy_cache cache;
proxy_cache_valid 200 1s;
...
}
• Cache responses with status code 200 for 1 second

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Optimized Microcaching with NGINX
server {
proxy_cache cache;
proxy_cache_valid 200 1s;
proxy_cache_lock on;
proxy_cache_use_stale updating;
...
}
• proxy_cache_lock – If there are multiple simultaneous requests for the
same uncached or stale content, only one request is allowed through. Others
are queued.
• proxy_cache_use_stale – Serve stale content while cached entry is being
updated.

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Cache Purging with NGINX Plus
proxy_cache_path /tmp/cache keys_zone=mycache:10m
levels=1:2 inactive=60s;
map $request_method $purge_method {
PURGE 1;
default 0;
}
server {
proxy_cache mycache;
proxy_cache_purge $purge_method;
}
$ curl -X PURGE -D – "http://www.example.com/*"
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
…

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multiserver Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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Load Balancing with NGINX

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Session Persistence with NGINX Plus
• Stick client to the same server for duration of a session
• Multiple methods:
• NGINX tracks application session cookie: ie. PHPSESSIONID
• NGINX inserts its own cookie
• Sticky Route – Persistence based on cookie, HTTP header, etc.
• IP Hash (Available in open source)
• Session draining – Gracefully remove servers from the load-balanced pool

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SSL Offloading with NGINX

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HTTP/2 with NGINX
NGINX translates HTTP/2 to the language your application speaks

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multi-Server Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?

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Monitoring with NGINX Amplify
• Get crucial performance and security recommendations with an analysis of your NGINX
configuration
• Stay on top of your systems with key visualizations of NGINX and OS metrics
• Know when servers need attention with a powerful alerting system
Sign up for the beta today: www.nginx.com/amplify

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Monitoring and Management with NGINX Plus
• Active health checks – Catch errors before they are seen by your users. NGINX Plus
actively monitors the health of your servers and directs traffic away from failed servers.
• JSON stats – Know what’s going on in your app with a wealth of status indicators. NGINX
Plus provides fine-grained stats on how each of your servers are performing. The stats are
in JSON format and can be exported to your favorite monitoring tool.

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Agenda
● What’s New in PHP 7
● Single-Server Performance Fixes
● Multi-Server Performance Fixes
● PHP 7 NGINX specifics
● Caching
● Load Balancing
● Bonus: Monitoring and Management
● Questions?