[November 20, 2014]

WP Engine and Facebook Combine to Enhance Speed, Stability and Performance for HHVM, the Open-Source Virtual Machine Project

There has been a new technological advancement for PHP developers and the developer community as a whole. For the very first time PHP and HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), an open-source project created by Facebook (News - Alert), can now run side-by-side on the same server, vastly increasing speed, performance and stability for websites in production environments. By doing so, modern websites and applications with dynamic content built on HHVM can see an average response time increase of 560%.

In conjunction with this development, WP Engine, a leading SaaS (News - Alert) content management platform for websites and applications built on WordPress, today launched Mercury, the company's new platform for dynamic content built on HHVM. Developed by WP Engine Labs, Mercury is 5.6X faster than the company's existing platform that already delivers unparalleled speed to power websites and applications, even under high load conditions. Mercury is in alpha-labs production, already powering www.10up.com as its first user.

"The enhanced speed and performance by HHVM in production environments is an obvious boon for PHP developers and the WP Engine Labs team has done an impressive job in democratizing HHVM for the open-source community," said Paul Tarjan, head of Open Source (News - Alert) for HHVM at Facebook. "We are excited to work alongside the Labs team to fine-tune the stack to reach HHVM's full potential and drastically speed up PHP execution. PHP is the bedrock of Facebook as well as much of the Internet and this announcement should come as a major fillip for the entire developer community."

HHVM was designed to execute progams written in Hack and PHP and achieves superior performance by running PHP code exponentially faster than standard PHP 5.5. As a young project, the system sometimes requires rebooting, which has led to the technology being deemed too unstable to use in production environments yet. However, with the WP Engine Mercury platform, PHP kicks in instantly to handle the load when HHVM requires resetting. The fall back PHP stack is a highly optimized, market-leading WP Engine WordPress stack that several enterprises already rely on. This ensures that websites and applications not only benefit from the speed of HHVM, but also benefit from enhanced stability enabling HHVM to be used in production environments for the first time.

"WordPress is built on PHP and currently powers more than 22% of websites on the Internet and by allowing HHVM to run on WordPress speeding it up by 560%, this breakthrough will come as a huge boost to not just the WordPress community, but developers everywhere," said Tomas Puig, Director of Labs at WP Engine. "It's a testament to the Labs team that we are the first to enable HHVM and PHP to run side-by-side on the same server in a geo-redundant environment. With the Mercury launch, enterprises and businesses can rely on WordPress to host their dynamic content in an even more lightning fast environment."

Features of WP Engine Mercury include:

• Geo Redundant Master Servers: Mercury is layered upon a new master platform, providing two identical fully in-sync clones of the server from geographically dispersed locations. This provides advanced disaster recovery, serving up data from the clone best able to handle the load.
• Pre-configured Vagrant tool: Provides a streamlined setup for local development and private staging environments. Vagrant provides an easy-to-use automated workflow for building development environments; decreasing setup times and increasing production parity.
• Built in Partnership with 10up: WP Engine partnered with the full stack engineering team at 10up, which has architected websites for household name such as AT&T (News - Alert), TechCrunch, Time, Wired, NBC Universal and more. The result is infrastructure and hosting technology years ahead of its time.

The performance boost and stability provided by WP Engine Mercury allows developers and marketing teams to:

• Enhance customer experience due to a 5.6X increase in speed
• Enhance SEO ranking on Google (News - Alert) due to faster load time
• Automatically scale immediately to unexpected spikes in traffic
• Scale user-tailored, dynamic websites such as membership and e-commerce sites without the need to purchase additional servers
• Create dynamic content per user without huge server clusters or escalating cost

Mercury is another innovation to come from WP Engine Labs after S3 Mirror, which allows for automatic mirroring of websites for advanced disaster recovery and GeoIP which identifies the location, organization, connection speed, and user type of incoming visitors to a website. WP Engine Labs is dedicated to contributing to the open-source community and currently serves as the innovation wing of WP Engine's product suite.

To apply for consideration for the Mercury Enterprise Platform, please visit http://wpengine.com/2014/11/19/hhvm-project-mercury/.

About WP Engine:

WP Engine is a leading SaaS content management platform for websites and applications built on WordPress. The company powers thousands of websites and apps built on the WordPress platform delivering a fast, reliable and secure web experience. All levels of users including bloggers, marketers, SMBs and large corporations rely on WP Engine's platform to keep their websites up and running. The company's exceptional customer service team specializes in quickly solving technical problems, and creating a world-class customer experience ensuring that each user's WordPress site continues to perform at its full potential. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas and has offices in San Francisco, California and San Antonio, Texas.

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