How to speed up Drupal 7 compiling PHP to C++?

Question

I would like to improve Drupal 7 performance with HipHop or any other similar solution transforming the code from PHP to C++ or C.

What steps are needed to properly do the scenario below ?

I would like to :

1. maintain @development environment as not-compiled php, adding and testing contrib and custom modules.
2. after testing @development, I do rsync @development to @staging ...
3. ... and compile @staging
4. test @staging
5. rsync @staging to @life

I think it is a bit oversimplification but should bring an overview.

If it is not possible, are there any other options ?

Answer 1

Following the chain from a comment on this great Wordpress tutorial on the new HHVM, I was led to Nick Veenhof's blog where he posted very recently about his unsuccessful efforts to get hiphop-php working with Drupal.

For what it's worth, the awesome maintainer of hiphop, Sara Goleman, said in the comments that she was interested in supporting Drupal and was going to try to reproduce the issue.

I'm working at building a vagrant VM to help reproduce the error and get everyone on the same page as easily as possible. The plan is to [use a patch that supposedly worked against Drupal 7.4, and hopefully move forward from that working state :)

https://github.com/patcon/vagrant-hiphop-drupal

Answer 2

Here is a link to the complete solution article where webtutor.pl shows how Drupal 7.4 compiled using HipHop for PHP is "up to 6 times faster than in a pure PHP environment".

Here are the benchmark test results comparing standalone Drupal vs Drupal with APC vs Drupal compiled using HipHop for PHP.