Twig extension
A while ago, Fabien asked me to have a look at porting one of Twig's slowest methods, TwigTemplate::getAttribute(), into a PHP extension. It is a complex method that does a lot of different checks and look-ups. Fabien's benchmarks showed that this method was responsible for quite a large amount of time. On top of that, it didn't seem that it could be optimised any further as PHP code itself. Seeing that it was very likely that this method would be a lot faster when written in C, SensioLabs decided to sponser me for the development of a port of this method into a PHP extension.
Over the next few months I've worked on re-implementing just this method as a C-function in twig-ext: twig_template_get_attributes(). From initial benchmarks it looks like this function as implemented in the extension gives about a 15% speed increase while rendering templates. Twig's compiled templates directly contain a call to this function (as opposed to marshal it through the original TwigTemplate::getAttribute() method) for additional performance. This probably means that you'll have to remove your compiled templates cache while upgrading.
The extension at http://github.com/derickr/twig-ext has now been merged, via http://github.com/derickr/Twig, into http://github.com/fabpot/Twig. The plan is that this new improvement is going to be part of Twig 1.4.
If you are also interested in having some of your PHP code ported into a PHP extension in C, please feel free to contact me.
Comments
This is a great news for all of us PHP-people out there! Thank you for doing this!
Awesome, thanks derick!
Cool, thanks Derick! Twig is the best.
I'm glad to see the sponsorship, hopefully you get more!
Great to hear. Good to know Sensio sponsored for it. So you get some penny also.
Great partnering! Was opcode caching (APC/Xcache etc) active when you were doing the 15% benchmark? I have always wondered about the C ext vs opcode-cached PHP performance in general.
@Halil: The benchmarks were being run from the command line, so no APC or other cache had any effect.
I've yet to find information on how to actually use/install the extension though. I assume that I must compile my own version of PHP with the necessary compiler flags to include the extension? I assume it's not at the point where you can add an twig-ext.so to your extensions dir?
@Jonathan: No need to recompile PHP. You can easily install the extension by checking out from github and running some commands (as long as you have a proper PHP development environment set-up):
git clone https://github.com/fabpot/Twig.git cd ext/twig phpize && ./configure && make install
And then add to your php.ini:
extension=twig.so
In the future you can hopefully install the extension by running:
pecl install twig
Hi Derick,
Thanks for the extension it really works well. Here is a benchmark I made about it:
http://www.strangebuzz.com/post/2013/02/21/Twig-C-extension-benchmark
See you. COil
Life Line
TIL that Kingfishers can hover just like hummingbird. I'll hopefully have some reasonable shots after I've gone through my nearly thousand shots today...
I hiked 9.8km in 3h40m47s
Updated a restaurant
Updated a vacant business
I walked 7.1km in 1h16m56s
I walked 3.9km in 45m56s
I walked 1.1km in 10m47s
I think this was my favourite photo of the set that I took. It's not at maximum coverage, but it does have a sun spot group (4508) just on the cusp of the terminator.
#eclipse #eclipse2026 #SolarEclipse #London #Astronomy #AstroPhotography #Photography
No totality here in London, but still had a great evening out in the local park and taking some snaps.
I did have a nice Solar Filter that I made for my lens, and had many conversations with people from different backgrounds. Kids loves to look through my filter after I was done (ran out of battery power).
More photos later...
#london #eclipse2026 #eclipse #photography
I walked 0.9km in 9m28s
I walked 1.2km in 19m05s
Merged pull request #1100
Fixed issue #2267: Application slow when debugger is not listening on…
I walked 4.7km in 48m18s
I walked 3.0km in 1h10m24s
Is there somebody who runs PHP on native windows (with Xdebug) and can run a simple script for me?
It must be in a file (`test.php`):
```
<?php
echo microtime(true), "\n";
xdebug_connect_to_client();
echo microtime(true), "\n";
```And run like:
php -dxdebug.log_level=11 -dxdebug.log=c:\temp\xdebug-i.log -dxdebug.client_host=localhost -dxdebug.client_port=9111 -dxdebug.mode=debug c:\temp\test.php
With the port 9111 not open.
Would love to see the output and log file (in a DM).
I walked 5.5km in 55m06s
@harry_wood This is this list of 100 Go-mistakes that I was talking about: https://100go.co/
Updated a crossing
I walked 2.1km in 20m08s
Enjoying my afternoon and evening out at Lords for some cricket!
I walked 3.2km in 38m54s
I walked 9.1km in 1h34m28s
Updated a gate
Updated a bakery shop
Shortlink
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