Proposed role: debops.hhvm

[jbackman]

HHVM, or the HipHop Virtual Machine, is a virtual machine for PHP developed by Facebook to improve the performance of PHP applications. Unlike the regular PHP runtime, HHVM uses a just-in-time compiler to convert scripts into native machine code. As a result, third-party benchmarks have shown as much as a 3x load time reduction over PHP-FPM 5.4 for tasks like loading a regular Drupal website.
Read more at: https://www.vultr.com/docs/installing-hhvm-and-nginx-apache-on-ubuntu-debian-mint

[Gomez]

AFAIK PHP7 will improve the performance a lot. Maybe its easier to focus on PHP7?

[drybjed]

The good news is, hhvm package is available in Sid. The bad news is, it seems to have many bugs and has not yet entered into Testing. I imagine it will be a while when it is available in jessie-backports, if ever due to all the transitions in Stretch.

Of course there's also upstream .deb repository with releases for Wheezy and Jessie, so we could go that route, however I would prefer to use Debian version as soon as it's available.

The other matter is support in different DebOps roles that rely on php5-fpm. However, since I'm warming up to the idea of dropping role dependencies from roles and moving them to playbooks, it would be easier to do after that. But transition will take a while (busy month at work ahead), so please be patient. :-)

[ypid]

@carlalexander already wrote a role which uses upstream packages. https://github.com/carlalexander/debops-wordpress/tree/master/roles/hhvm

For the inpatient once, you can go with this for now 😄

[ypid]

Can be closed in favor to PHP7.