No seriously, it is.
HHVM stands for "HipHop Virtual Machine". It is an alternative PHP runtime, developed by Facebook and other open source contributors to improve the performance of PHP code. It stemmed from HipHop for PHP, an earlier project at Facebook which compiled PHP into C++ code. Compared to the default PHP runtime, it offers significant speedup for many operations.
In March 2014, a group of MediaWiki developers started working on ensuring that the codebase, along with the various PHP extensions used on Wikimedia servers, were compatible with HHVM. This involved making changes to MediaWiki, filing bugs with the HHVM project, and often also submitting patches for those bugs.
Users will see performance improvements in many places, especially when editing extremely large articles. If you're interested in helping the development team out with finding bugs, or just want your editing experience to be faster, you can enable the "HHVM" betafeature in your preferences.
We caught up with longtime MediaWiki developer and lead platform architect Tim Starling and asked him a few questions about the HHVM migration:
What is HHVM?
What have the performance gains of HHVM been so far? Are they expected to increase over time?
What sort of impact can users expect from the deployment of HHVM? What sort of issues might users run into?
What effort has gone into ensuring that HHVM performs well and is reliable, especially at Wikipedia's scale?
What was the biggest challenge to rolling out HHVM?
What is Hack and do you think it will affect Wikimedia development?
Currently logged-out users have a significantly faster experience than logged-in users. Is it realistic to expect that logged-in users will one day have the same experience as logged-out users? If so, when?
After HHVM is fully deployed, what are the next big projects to improve performance?
More information is available at
mw:HHVM/About, and information about the current development process can be found at
mw:HHVM.
P.S.: If you too find HHVM to be awesome, you can leave your thanks to the developers here.
No seriously, it is.
HHVM stands for "HipHop Virtual Machine". It is an alternative PHP runtime, developed by Facebook and other open source contributors to improve the performance of PHP code. It stemmed from HipHop for PHP, an earlier project at Facebook which compiled PHP into C++ code. Compared to the default PHP runtime, it offers significant speedup for many operations.
In March 2014, a group of MediaWiki developers started working on ensuring that the codebase, along with the various PHP extensions used on Wikimedia servers, were compatible with HHVM. This involved making changes to MediaWiki, filing bugs with the HHVM project, and often also submitting patches for those bugs.
Users will see performance improvements in many places, especially when editing extremely large articles. If you're interested in helping the development team out with finding bugs, or just want your editing experience to be faster, you can enable the "HHVM" betafeature in your preferences.
We caught up with longtime MediaWiki developer and lead platform architect Tim Starling and asked him a few questions about the HHVM migration:
What is HHVM?
What have the performance gains of HHVM been so far? Are they expected to increase over time?
What sort of impact can users expect from the deployment of HHVM? What sort of issues might users run into?
What effort has gone into ensuring that HHVM performs well and is reliable, especially at Wikipedia's scale?
What was the biggest challenge to rolling out HHVM?
What is Hack and do you think it will affect Wikimedia development?
Currently logged-out users have a significantly faster experience than logged-in users. Is it realistic to expect that logged-in users will one day have the same experience as logged-out users? If so, when?
After HHVM is fully deployed, what are the next big projects to improve performance?
More information is available at
mw:HHVM/About, and information about the current development process can be found at
mw:HHVM.
P.S.: If you too find HHVM to be awesome, you can leave your thanks to the developers here.
Discuss this story
UX approach feedback
Thanks for the write-up. Sounds promising. You asked:
I would say yes to both questions, on the principle that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Many good editors make rapid-fire, serial micro-edits, with discrete edit summaries; many more editors often take several edits to fix a citation to their satisfaction: both large sets of users would certainly benefit from quick feedback, just as Wikipedia benefits from their test-driven edits.
Screw the UX of the fewer (I hope) suspected spammers or vandals. They can wait. -- Paulscrawl ( talk) 01:43, 11 October 2014 (UTC) reply
Specialist-targeted details
Nice effort to engage with non-specialists at the top, but could you explain for us, for example: "The net effect is to allow an existing PHP codebase to be progressively migrated to strong typing, with many type checks being done pre-commit instead of at runtime.”? Perhaps a wider editorship should know about these things. Tony (talk) 08:09, 11 October 2014 (UTC) reply