Benchmarking Symfony Standard

We, developers, love meaningless benchmarks. Here's one for the Symfony Standard Edition.

Usage

First prepare the environment:

rm -rf var/cache/* var/logs/* vendor
composer install -o --no-dev
bin/console cache:clear -e=prod
curl http://bench-sf-standard.example.com/

Then use Apache Benchmark for 10 seconds with 10 concurrent clients:

ab -c 10 -t 10 'http://bench-sf-standard.example.com/'

Finally use blackfire to profile the request:

blackfire curl http://bench-sf-standard.example.com/

Results

Metric	Value
Requests per second	690.84#/sec
Time per request	14.475ms
Time per request (across all concurrent requests)	1.448ms

Benchmarks run with:

• PHP 7 (7.0.4-7+deb.sury.org~trusty+2) with Zend OPcache enabled and without Xdebug
• Linux 3.13.0-83-generic, Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS, x86_64
• Lenovo Yoga 13, with core i7

Profiling

Metric	Value
Requests per second	242.25#/sec
Wall Time	27.1ms
CPU Time	20.2ms
I/O Time	6.88ms
Memory	2.09MB

Profiling reveals that the most expensive part is Autoloading, via spl_autoload_call:

• 80 times
• inclusive wall time of 10ms (36.99%)
  • inclusive I/O time of 4.5ms
  • inclusive CPU time of 5.53ms
  • inclusive memory use of 435KB

Its main callers are:

• Swiftmailer
• ContainerAware EventDispatcher
• Dependency Injection Container
• AppKernel (registerBundles)

Web Server Configuration

Since PHP built in server runs on a single-threaded process, we need to use something else for our benchmarks.

We've picked nginx with PHP-FPM, but feel free to use another one. Here's the configuration used:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name bench-sf-standard.example.com;
    root /home/foobar/bench-sf-standard/web;

    location / {
        # try to serve file directly, fallback to app.php
        try_files $uri /app.php$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ ^/app\.php(/|$) {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;

        include fastcgi_params;

        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

        # Prevents URIs that include the front controller. This will 404:
        # http://domain.tld/app.php/some-path
        # Remove the internal directive to allow URIs like this
        internal;
    }

    error_log /home/foobar/bench-sf-standard/var/logs/nginx_error.log;
    access_log /home/foobar/bench-sf-standard/var/logs/nginx_access.log;
}