News

App Monitoring Tool Claims First PHP 7 Support

• By David Ramel
• February 2, 2016

Just a couple months after the release of PHP 7, AppNeta Inc. claimed to be the only company in its Application Performance Management (APM) space to support the newest version of the ubiquitous Web scripting language.

That space would be the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) arena, where AppNeta provides various APM solutions for DevOps and IT users, such as AppView for monitoring the end-user experience of Web apps. According to industry stats, those apps are likely to be using PHP, which reportedly gets a significant speed boost with the December 2015 introduction of PHP 7.

"PHP, the language behind more than 80 percent of the Internet, powers more than 200 million Web sites," the company said in a statement yesterday. "PHP 7, the first major update in more than a decade, is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6 (7.0's predecessor) while also reducing memory usage by up to 50 percent. It also includes advancements such as the spaceship operator, scalar type definitions and anonymous classes, among others."

AppNeta engineer Ashish Kakran tried out PHP 7 and did indeed record performance gains ranging from 42 percent to 73 percent for certain metrics, he related in a blog post yesterday.

"While exciting, PHP 7 will only be as good as its adoption," Kakran said. "Major content management systems and platforms need to support PHP 7 (for example, WordPress, Drupal) for it to truly deliver on performance promises, but for the PHP developers around the globe, the times are exciting!"

Kakran said PHP 7 currently has a low adoption rate due to its infancy, but Web developers and users should start realizing much better experiences as providers began to incorporate it into production.

"Whether you are evaluating PHP 7 today in pre-production environments or planning to roll it out to production over the coming months, AppNeta can help you isolate and fix performance issues with the newer, more performant version of the most common language on the Internet," he said.

Company CTO Dan Kuebrich agreed. "As a company dedicated to improving performance, we're excited by the promise of PHP 7," he said in a statement yesterday. "As developers continue to adopt or upgrade to this latest version, we're going to see significant improvements in speed and user experience on the Web. By supporting PHP 7 soon after its introduction, our goal is to accelerate its adoption by empowering web developers with comprehensive APM solutions to mitigate performance issues."