[HipHop] WMF/HHVM status/check-in

[Sean Cannella]

Hi Tim -

Thanks for the update. We just hadn't heard anything in a while and wanted
to check on the status of the effort. As the previous discussions have
indicated, we are excited about getting WMF up and running on HHVM.

Re: docs, we do already have hhvm --help for the basic commandline options
and/but more importantly, doc/options.compiled and options.compiler cover
the broader and more interesting set of configuration options. If there
are specific settings or topics you're interested in that we haven't
covered, please let us know so we know what to focus on here.

Re: test suite, I asked Paul about this and he was just made aware of it
when reading this email. I'm not sure this is something we can help with
directly but anything that is blocking this, please file GitHub issues and
let us know so we can look at them. (Tyler identified and reported one
issue to us on the reply that we've already fixed internally and should be
pushed soon and we identified a workaround as well.)

Re: benchmarks, this is most likely something WMF is going to need to help
with since we're not going to be able to get meaningful numbers in your
environment. If there are HHVM issues blocking this, as with the test
suite, please file GitHub issues so we can address them.

doc/repo should answer some of your questions, but, in short:
At Facebook, in production we use Repo.Authoritative and pre-compiled
repos for maximum performance.
Don't put repos on NFS is the internal guidance.
For sandbox testing and development we just non-authoritative repos due to
the compilation overhead after making a PHP change and wanting to test. On
a sandbox environment, the central repo is local so it is not really an
issue.
If you use 'Repo.Local.Mode=r-' with a local one and not using eval() then
the local one should not be written to at all in RepoAuthoritative mode.
The central is a fallback and used if we need to write bytecode if the
local repo is not being used or not writable.
Hopefully this helps answer your question.

Thanks,
Sean Cannella | Eng | HipHop | NYC 17.D.07C
If you are smart and persistent, you may find the truth. It is not always
a reward.




On 7/16/13 7:28 PM, "Tim Starling" <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>On 17/07/13 07:18, Sean Cannella wrote:
>> Hi -
>>
>> I'm a relatively new engineer on the HipHop VM team and just joined
>> our Open Source effort so I haven't met any of you yet. Hi!
>>
>> Since we haven't had any traffic on this list in the past month or
>> so, I just wanted to check in; is WikiMedia waiting on something
>> from Facebook / plugging away / other?
>> We want to make sure silence doesn't mean that both sides of this
>> effort think they are blocked on the other.
>> Let us know if you need any support from us to proceed or, if not,
>> generally how things are going with the port.
>
>Hi Sean,
>
>We (WMF Platform Engineering) are a pretty small team, with a lot of
>other responsibilities. Nobody is assigned to work primarily on HipHop
>at the moment, but we're planning a concerted project aimed at
>production deployment starting in September or October.
>
>In the meantime, I hope there will be some work from WMF volunteers,
>WMF staff with spare time, and FB staff. The kinds of things I'd like
>to see are:
>
>* Updates to hphp/doc/*, for example, documentation of what hhvm is
>and what its command-line parameters are.
>* Successful execution of the MediaWiki unit test suite, if that's not
>done already.
>* Comparative benchmarks, such as parse times of large articles, and
>complete page view times for parser cache hits.
>
>I'd also be interested in having a discussion about strategies for
>bytecode repo management. Should repos be pre-built before deployment,
>or should the application servers just be allowed to populate the
>repos while serving normal traffic? And what is the central/local
>split meant to be for? Presumably SQLite's locking strategy wouldn't
>work across a shared filesystem like NFS -- maybe you have a different
>definition of "central"?
>
>Should Repo.Authoritative be used?
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
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