HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a process virtual machine based on just-in-time (JIT) compilation, serving as an execution engine for PHP and Hack programming languages. By using the principle of JIT compilation, executed PHP or Hack code is first transformed into intermediate HipHop bytecode (HHBC), which is then dynamically translated into the x86-64 machine code, optimized and natively executed.
According to their website, HHVM has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the Zend PHP engine + APC (which is the current way of hosting a large majority of PHP applications).
Installing HHVM
Installing HHVM is quite straightforward and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Login as root and execute the following commands from the command line will have HHVM installed and ready:
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d # wget http://www.hop5.in/yum/el6/hop5.repo # yum install hhvm
Sample output
Dependencies Resolved
================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository
Size
================================================================================
Installing:
hhvm x86_64 3.2.0-1.el6 hop5 9.6 M
Installing for dependencies:
GConf2 x86_64 2.28.0-6.el6 base 964 k
ImageMagick x86_64 6.8.6.3-4.el6 hop5 138 k
ImageMagick-libs x86_64 6.8.6.3-4.el6 hop5 1.9 M
ORBit2 x86_64 2.14.17-5.el6 base 168 k
OpenEXR-libs x86_64 1.6.1-8.1.el6 base 197 k
boost x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 32 k
boost-atomic x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 34 k
boost-chrono x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 40 k
boost-context x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 33 k
boost-date-time x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 47 k
boost-filesystem x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 63 k
boost-graph x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 126 k
boost-iostreams x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 55 k
boost-locale x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 251 k
boost-log x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 599 k
boost-math x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 324 k
boost-program-options x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 145 k
boost-python x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 124 k
boost-random x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 36 k
boost-regex x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 298 k
boost-serialization x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 155 k
boost-signals x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 56 k
boost-system x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 36 k
boost-test x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 212 k
boost-thread x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 55 k
boost-timer x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 38 k
boost-wave x86_64 1.54.0-7.el6 hop5 198 k
fftw x86_64 3.2.1-3.1.el6 base 1.2 M
gd x86_64 2.0.35-11.el6 base 142 k
ghostscript x86_64 8.70-19.el6 base 4.4 M
ghostscript-fonts noarch 5.50-23.2.el6 base 590 k
glog x86_64 0.3.2-1.el6 hop5 48 k
ilmbase x86_64 1.0.1-6.1.el6 base 72 k
jemalloc x86_64 3.6.0-1.el6 epel 100 k
lcms2 x86_64 2.3-2.el6 epel 127 k
libICE x86_64 1.0.6-1.el6 base 53 k
libIDL x86_64 0.8.13-2.1.el6 base 83 k
libSM x86_64 1.2.1-2.el6 base 37 k
libXfont x86_64 1.4.5-3.el6_5 base 136 k
libXt x86_64 1.1.4-6.1.el6 base 165 k
libcroco x86_64 0.6.2-5.el6 base 100 k
libdwarf x86_64 20140413-1.el6 epel 108 k
libfontenc x86_64 1.0.5-2.el6 base 24 k
libgsf x86_64 1.14.15-5.el6 base 116 k
libicu x86_64 4.2.1-9.1.el6_2 base 4.9 M
libmcrypt x86_64 2.5.8-9.el6 epel 96 k
libmemcached x86_64 1.0.16-1.el6 hop5 208 k
libmpc x86_64 0.8.3-0.3.svn855.el6 hop5 47 k
librsvg2 x86_64 2.26.0-14.el6 base 140 k
libtool-ltdl x86_64 2.4.2-21.el6 hop5 46 k
libunwind x86_64 1.1-2.el6 epel 54 k
libwmf-lite x86_64 0.2.8.4-23.el6 base 51 k
libxslt x86_64 1.1.26-2.el6_3.1 base 452 k
mysql x86_64 5.1.73-3.el6_5 base 894 k
ocaml x86_64 3.12.1-12.el6 hop5 5.5 M
ocaml-runtime x86_64 3.12.1-12.el6 hop5 1.4 M
oniguruma x86_64 5.9.1-3.1.el6 base 123 k
sgml-common noarch 0.6.3-33.el6 base 43 k
tbb x86_64 4.0-7.20120408.el6 hop5 103 k
unixODBC x86_64 2.2.14-14.el6 base 378 k
urw-fonts noarch 2.4-10.el6 base 3.1 M
xorg-x11-font-utils x86_64 1:7.2-11.el6 base 75 k
Updating for dependencies:
cpp x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 5.7 M
curl x86_64 7.29.0-4.el6 hop5 256 k
gcc x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 17 M
gcc-c++ x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 6.9 M
libcurl x86_64 7.29.0-4.el6 hop5 198 k
libcurl-devel x86_64 7.29.0-4.el6 hop5 294 k
libevent x86_64 1.4.14b-2.hphp.el6 hop5 66 k
libgcc x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 83 k
libgomp x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 100 k
libstdc++ x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 289 k
libstdc++-devel x86_64 4.8.2-8.el6 hop5 1.5 M
Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install 63 Package(s)
Upgrade 11 Package(s)
Total download size: 73 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
To confirm that HHVM has been installed, type the following command:
# hhvm --version
This will show details of how the hhvm command can be used from the command line. Here is a sample screenshot that illustrates this:
HipHop VM 3.2.0 (rel) Compiler: tags/HHVM-3.2.0-0-g01228273b8cf709aacbd3df1c51b1e690ecebac8 Repo schema: c52ba40f4a246d35a88f1dfc1daf959851ced8aa
Using Nginx with HHVM
If you are using Nginx with PHP-FPM, you’ll have to modify the configuration file to enable the use of HHVM.
Look for the following section and make sure it’s all uncommented (by remove a # at the beginning of each line)
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
Create a file called name “hhsvr” to start or restart HHVM service
# vi /usr/bin/hhsrv # chmod +x /usr/bin/hhsrv
Append
#!/bin/bash
LOG="/var/log/hhvm.log"
CMD="hhvm --mode server -vServer.Type=fastcgi -vServer.Port=9000"
if [ "$1" == "-h" ] || [ "$1" == "--help" ]; then
echo "To restart HHVM: /usr/bin/hhsrv restart|stop\n"
exit;
fi
# Restart HHVM
if [ "$1" == "restart" ]; then
PID=$(ps aux | grep -v grep | grep hhvm | awk '{print $2}')
echo "Restarting HHVM..."
if [ "${PID}" != "" ]; then
kill -9 ${PID}
fi
echo "Starting HHVM ..."
${CMD} > /dev/null 2>&1 &
echo "DONE !!!"
fi
# Stop HHVM
if [ "$1" == "stop" ]; then
PID=$(ps aux | grep -v grep | grep hhvm | awk '{print $2}')
echo "Restarting HHVM..."
if [ "${PID}" != "" ]; then
kill -9 ${PID}
fi
echo "HHVM stopped !!!"
fi
Final, Type the following command to start HHVM
# hhsrv restart