Michal Čihař - Archive for March 7, 2017

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2017-W09

Last was equally spent on bugfixing phpMyAdmin and improving our Docker container.

From the bugfixing phpMyAdmin, I've spent great time with HHVM. It all started with bug report that phpMyAdmin is not working with HHVM 3.18. I've quickly fixed reported errors and wanted to add HHVM to our test matrix on Travis CI. This was not that easy as expected due to need to upgrade Travis image to Trusty. Once I did that, the build no longer worker reliably as MySQL server was sometimes not started. This showed to be known Travis bug, which can be workarounded by not using their container based infrastructure.

Once I had everything building and testing, I've noticed that the complete test takes incredibly long on recent HHVM versions (3 minutes with HHVM 3.3, 12 minutes with HHVM 3.12 and 7 minutes with HHVM 3.18). After digging a bit deeper (and adding listing of 10 slowest testcases) I've been able to produce testcase and report issue to HHVM. So if you're using phpMyAdmin with recent HHVM and it's slow, this might be the cause.

Last but not least, our Docker container got several performance tweaks, mostly tweaking PHP's opcache settings.

Handled issues: