December 2016 Summaries

In 2016, Aerospike customers experienced significant growth and success, including seven acquisitions such as Exelate by Nielsen, TubeMogul by Adobe for $450 million, and AppLovin's $1.4 billion acquisition. Additionally, one customer, The Trade Desk, had a successful IPO at $28.75 per share. Other customers like AppNexus saw 100% year-over-year growth, while InMobi experienced a 15-fold increase in China over four years. Aerospike acknowledges and appreciates the continued support from its customers for their successful 2016.

The Aerospike API Client for PHP has been optimized with the new Zend Engine in PHP 7, resulting in significant performance improvements over PHP 5. This is due to changes in how variables are represented and stored, as well as more efficient memory management. Benchmarking tests show that PHP 7 offers better throughput and lower execution times compared to PHP 5, with up to a 2x increase in performance for some workloads. Additionally, PHP 7 uses less memory than PHP 5 due to its new zval representation and hash table implementation. These improvements make the Aerospike PHP Client more efficient and better suited for handling complex transactions.

The Aerospike PHP Client is built on top of the Aerospike C Client as an extension for PHP. The main focus of PHP 7 is to optimize the structure that represents a variable in PHP—Zend values (zvals). In PHP 7, zvals are not heap allocated and no longer store a refcount. Instead, the refcount is stored by any complex values the zval points to. This results in significant performance improvements, as storing refcount in the values themselves allows them to be shared independently of the zval structure. The Aerospike PHP Client was benchmarked using the multi-process script (rw-worker.php) with different read/write ratios, four workers, and 100,000 iterations. The test showed that PHP 7 outperforms PHP 5 in terms of total execution time, combined throughput, time spent inside each operation, and memory consumption. The performance improvements are due to significant memory savings, thanks to the new zval representation and hash table implementation in PHP 7.