PHP (the programming language that WordPress is written in) version 7 is not yet released, but it must be close – they’ve recently released the 6th release candidate. We’re already running and testing UpdraftPlus on it (that includes current releases – it’s already compatible!).
One of the biggest attractions for PHP 7 is speed – as the PHP team say, “Improved performance: PHP 7 is up to twice as fast as PHP 5.6” (5.6 is the current latest release – there is no PHP 6). Independent testing is bearing this claim out.
But, not only is this so, but it has new features too. One of these allows more flexibility for programmers in the creation of zip files. Leveraging these improvements, we can now achieve significantly less CPU usage and faster backups when PHP’s built-in zip engine is being used.
These improvements came to all users for UpdraftPlus’s preferred zip engine a few releases ago. The PHP zip engine is not the preferred one – there’s a faster alternative often available. However, not every server has that preferred zip engine available. When it’s not, the next preference is to use PHP’s built-in zip engine. So, the good news is this: once you’re running PHP 7, you’ll get the significant speed improvements upon zip creation whether you’ve got the default available, or got the next-preferred fallback available. This covers basically 99% of cases (ad hoc statistic – based on our observation of the many log files we see from various sources). What does this mean? As we said when these improvements were made to the default engine:
Using a 180Mb media library that we had to hand for testing, we found that we could reduce the amount of time spent in zip processing by around 50%.
This kind of optimisation brings wins all around. Less CPU is used, more can be done in less time (and so less resumptions are needed on hosting setups where a process gets killed after a defined number of seconds), backups finish quicker, more can be squeezed out of bargain-basement hosting, etc.; everyone’s happy.
David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus).
