Performance degredation

[mpociot]

For Laravel Herd, we compile the current versions of PHP with a version of static-php-cli from December 2023.

After upgrading to the latest version on the main branch, I notice a significant performance decrease with the compiled version of PHP.

I noticed this by running the Laravel 11 test suite. One test in particular https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/11.x/tests/Support/SupportStrTest.php#L589-L602

Used extensions/build parameters:

intl,pdo_sqlite,sqlite3,curl,openssl,tokenizer,bcmath,bz2,calendar,dba,ftp,iconv,mysqli,mbstring,mbregex,xml,simplexml,ctype,dom,pdo,filter,session,zlib,fileinfo,pdo_mysql,posix,sockets,shmop,sodium,sysvmsg,sysvsem,sysvshm,gd,zip,gmp,redis,xmlwriter,phar,exif,xmlreader,readline,pcntl,soap,imagick,ffi,password-argon2,pgsql,pdo_pgsql,imap,ldap,xsl --debug --build-cli  --build-fpm --with-libs=nghttp2 --no-strip

To reproduce the issue:

git clone https://github.com/laravel/framework.git
cd framework
composer update
php vendor/bin/phpunit tests/Support/SupportStrTest.php --filter=testWhetherTheNumberOfGeneratedCharactersIsEquallyDistributed

Test results

PHP 8.3.4 compiled with the version of static-php-cli from December 2023:

Time: 00:00.264, Memory: 10.00 MB

PHP 8.3.4 compiled with the current main branch

Time: 00:00.777, Memory: 10.00 MB

Edit: I'll go through some tagged versions locally using the build arguments to see which version introduced this bug

[crazywhalecc]

After 2.1.0 (released 3 weeks ago), we have static-php-cli.version PHP info injection. Just use php -i | grep static-php-cli to see which version. But based on your description, Herd is most likely using a version before 2.0.0 release.

[mpociot]

So far I tested two points in time where the performance issue is already present. As I can't build tag 2.0.1 because of an issue with libxml that got patched between 2.0.1 and 2.1.0, I had to use a specific commit hash.

These versions already have the performance degredation in place:

❌ Tag 2.1.0 ❌ Commit https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli/pull/304

✅ The last upstream commit that we use on Herd was this: https://github.com/crazywhalecc/static-php-cli/commit/cf198e0f0a4133dd62bcce79ea4e7932b45abd4f

Building PHP 8.3.4 on this specific commit does not have the performance issue.

So the issue seems to have been introduced between the 2.0.0 RC and the stable 2.0.0 release.

[crazywhalecc]

Oh I found it. Just because Herd is using --no-strip, and when no strip, the optimization flag will be -g -O0 (default is -g0 -Os). In the main branch, I disabled optimizations for debugging purposes.

Maybe it's time to resolve #377 and #382 (for passing in custom compilation flags) as soon as possible. 🤔

[mpociot]

Ah yeah. Well I also wouldn't mind if there would be a simple argument to re-add the optimization flags 🤷‍♂️ Thank you for looking into this

[crazywhalecc]

After a week of various attempts, I finally decided with difficulty to give up this plan: change all parameters to environment variables.

Mainly because I can't figure out which ones need to be customized frequently and which ones don't. There is no scope here. For this topic only, I think we can maintain a customizable compilation parameter variable table in the document, for example:

var name	default value	comment
SPC_PHP_EXTRA_CFLAGS	-g -Os	used in php-src's make EXTRA_CFLAGS={$vars}

[mpociot]

Sounds good to me @crazywhalecc Does that mean that once this is implemented, I can simply rely on the default values?

[crazywhalecc]

@mpociot I won't change current build flags. For Laravel Herd macOS, the best way is just using export SPC_CMD_VAR_PHP_MAKE_EXTRA_CFLAGS="-g -Os" and --no-strip. (for future, add to CI's env?)

This update will be completed within a week and will have 2.2.0 as the version number.

SPC_CMD_VAR_PHP_MAKE_EXTRA_CFLAGS this name is a bit long because many environment variables may need to be introduced at present. I will also write these into the static-php.dev document.

[mpociot]

Great, thank you! Is this already implemented?

[crazywhalecc]

WIP, but env vars for MacOSBuilder have already finished. I'm finishing up the Linux part now.

[crazywhalecc]

Finished, docs: https://static-php.dev/en/guide/env-vars.html