README

PHP-PM is a process manager, supercharger and load balancer for PHP applications.

It's based on ReactPHP and works best with applications that use request-response frameworks like Symfony's HTTPKernel. The approach of this is to kill the expensive bootstrap of PHP (declaring symbols, loading/parsing files) and the bootstrap of feature-rich frameworks. See Performance section for a quick hint. PHP-PM basically spawns several PHP instances as worker bootstraping your application (eg. the whole Symfony Kernel) and hold it in the memory to be prepared for every incoming request: This is why PHP-PM makes your application so fast.

More information can be found in the article: Bring High Performance Into Your PHP App (with ReactPHP)

Features

• Performance boost up to 15x (compared to PHP-FPM, Symfony applications).
• Integrated load balancer.
• Hot-Code reload (when PHP files changes).
• Static file serving for easy development procedures.
• Support for HttpKernel (Symfony/Laravel), Drupal (experimental), Zend (experimental).

Why using PPM as development server instead of vagrant, nginx or apache?

• No hassle with file permissions (www-data vs local user ids).
• No painful slow virtual-box file sync.
• Faster response times of your PHP app.
• No fighting with vagrant / virtual machine settings.
• Checkout a new project, run ppm start - done. (if configured with ppm config)
• No hassle with domain names (/etc/hosts), just use different ports for your app without root access.

Installation

To get PHP-PM you need beside the php binary also php-cgi, which comes often with php. If not availabe try to install it:

Debian/Ubuntu (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upgrade-to-php-7-on-ubuntu-14-04)

apt-get install php7.0-cgi

Mac OS X - Homebrew (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-php)

brew install php70

Mac OS X - Macports

port install php70-cgi

By default, PPM looks for a binary named php-cgi. If your PHP installation uses a different binary name, you can specify the full path to that binary with the php-cgi configuration option (for example: ppm config --php-cgi=/opt/local/bin/php-cgi70).

Global

$ git clone git@github.com:php-pm/php-pm.git
$ cd php-pm
$ composer install
$ ln -s `pwd`/bin/ppm /usr/local/bin/ppm
$ ppm --help

Per project

# change minimum-stability to dev in your composer.json (until we have a version tagged): "minimum-stability": "dev"
composer require php-pm/php-pm:dev-master
composer require php-pm/httpkernel-adapter:dev-master #if you have httpkernel (laravel, symfony)
./vendor/bin/ppm config --bootstrap=symfony #places a ppm.json in your directory
./vendor/bin/ppm start #reads ppm.json and starts the server like you want

Once configured (composer and ppm.json) you can start your app on your development machine or server instantly:

composer install
./vendor/bin/ppm start

When debug is enabled, PHP-PM detects file changes and restarts its worker automatically.

Performance & Debugging tips

To get the maximum performance you should usually use --app-env=prod with disabled debug --debug=0. Also make sure xdebug is disabled. Try with different amount of workers. Usually a 10% over your cpu core count is good. Example: If you have 8 real cores (excl. hyper-threading) use --workers=9.

If your applications supports it, try enabled concurrent requests per worker: --concurrent-requests=1.

To get even more performance (for static file serving or for rather fast applications) try a different event loop:

If you get strange issues in your application and you have no idea where they are coming from try using only one worker --workers=1.

Adapter

HttpKernel for Symfony/Laravel - https://github.com/php-pm/php-pm-httpkernel

Drupal - https://github.com/php-pm/php-pm-drupal

Zend - https://github.com/php-pm/php-pm-zend

Command

Start

cd ~/my/path/to/symfony/
ppm start

ppm start ~/my/path/to/symfony/ --bootstrap=Symfony --bridge=HttpKernel

cd ~/my/path/to/symfony/
./vendor/bin/ppm start

Symfony

cd my-project
composer require php-pm/httpkernel-adapter:dev-master
$ ./bin/ppm start --bootstrap=symfony

Laravel

cd my-project
composer require php-pm/httpkernel-adapter:dev-master
$ ./vendor/bin/ppm start --bootstrap=laravel

Drupal

cd my-project
composer require php-pm/httpkernel-adapter:dev-master
$ ./bin/ppm start --bootstrap=drupal

Zend

cd my-project
composer require php-pm/zend-adapter:dev-master
$ ./bin/ppm start --bridge=Zf2 --bootstrap=Zf2

Each worker starts its own HTTP Server which listens on port 5501, 5502, 5503 etc. Range is 5501 -> 5500+<workersCount>. You can integrate those workers directly in a load balancer like NGINX or use http://127.0.0.1:8080 directly.

Performance

6x3,2 GHz Intel, 16GB RAM. 20 concurrent, 1000 total request: ab -c 20 -n 1000 http://127.0.0.1:8080/

PHP 7, StreamSelectLoop

/usr/local/bin/php7 ./bin/ppm start ~/www/symfony--bridge=httpKernel --app-env=prod --logging=0 --debug=0 --workers=8

Static file: 2371.93 requests/s
Dynamic CMS application: 1685.80 request/s (http://jarves.io)

PHP 5.6.18, StreamSelectLoop

/usr/local/bin/php5 ./bin/ppm start ~/www/symfony --bridge=httpKernel --app-env=prod --logging=0 --debug=0 --workers=8

Static file: 1818.52 requests/s
Dynamic CMS application: 1270.30 request/s (http://jarves.io)

Issues

• Memory leaks, memory leaks and memory leaks. You will find also leaks in your application. :)
• Does not work with ExtEventLoop. (So don't install php70-event)
• Drupal is very experimental and not fully working. Try using https://github.com/php-pm/php-pm-drupal.
• Symfony's and Laravel's profiler aren't working yet perfectly since it's still needed to reset some stuff after each request.
• Streamed responses are not streamed yet
• File upload is experimental
• No windows support due to signal handling
• Doesn't fully implement HTTP/1.1, but reactphp/http is working on it.

Please help us to fix those issues by creating pull requests. :)

Setup 1. Use external Load-Balancer

Example config for NGiNX:

upstream backend  {
    server 127.0.0.1:5501;
    server 127.0.0.1:5502;
    server 127.0.0.1:5503;
    server 127.0.0.1:5504;
    server 127.0.0.1:5505;
    server 127.0.0.1:5506;
}

server {
    root /path/to/symfony/web/;
    server_name servername.com;
    location / {
        try_files $uri @backend;
    }
    location @backend {
        proxy_pass http://backend;
    }
}

Setup 2. Use internal Load-Balancer

This setup is slower as we can't load balance incoming connections as fast as NGiNX it does, but it's perfect for testing purposes.