Making PHP apps in Wasm incredibly fast
summary
Slides and demos show PHP compiled to WebAssembly running in Wasmer and Wasmer Edge using opcache, WebAssembly exceptions (xref) and an LVM-based backend, not just cranelift. Measured results move from ~600 ms page load to 60 ms WordPress response, with cold starts reduced to ~90 ms using snapshot journals (instabut) and steady-state runtime sitting at about 15% slower than native. The system is deployed and working in production.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00PHP in Wasm introduction
- 1:27WordPress and PHP in Wasm
- 3:36WordPress slowdown in Wasm
- 5:23Switching to LLVM for speed
- 6:46Wasm exceptions for PHP
- 9:09Wasm exceptions explained
- 16:59Benchmarking PHP with Wasm
- 18:46Live PHP performance demo
- 20:37Reducing WordPress cold starts
- 22:43Instaboot near-zero cold starts
- 23:48Deploying WordPress on Wasmer Edge
- 24:54Q&A
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