How to scale PHP applications

by Jan Burkl, Enrico Zimuel

Zend Technologies

http://www.zend.com
jan.burkl@zend.com, enrico@zend.com

30th October 2010 – PHP Barcelona Conference

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Summary
● Scalability of a web application
●
How to scale a PHP application
●
PHP session management
●
Sharing session data using:
Network
▶ file system
Database
▶

Memcached
▶

▶ Redis
▶ Zend Server Cluster Manager

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Scalability of a web
application

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Scalability: general definition

“Scalability is a desirable property of a

system, a network, or a process, which
indicates its ability to either handle
growing amounts of work in a graceful
manner or to be enlarged”
Source: Wikipedia

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Scalability of a web application

A web application is scalable when is

able to manage a growing traffic with
additional resources (CPU, RAM)
without software changes

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Scale vertically vs. Scale horizontally
●
Scale vertically (scale up)
▶ Add resources to a single node in a system
▶ Enhance the server (more CPU, more RAM, etc)
▶ High availability difficult to implement

●
Scale horizontally (scale out)
▶ Add mores nodes to a system
▶ More servers, distributing the load
▶ High availability easy to implement

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Scale up vs. Scale out

vs.

Scale up Scale out

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The web scale out
●
As Google taught, the best way to scale an high traffic
web application is horizontally
●
No expensive servers to scale horizontally

A Google server

●
We need load balancers to split the traffic
between all the servers

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A typical load balancer architecture

Load Balancer

Firewall

Internet

Web Servers

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How to scale a PHP application?
●
The PHP application uses session/local data?
▶Yes = we have to manage the session/local
data across multiple servers
●
Using a persistent load balancer
● Share the session data
▶ No = we can scale very easy (stateless)
●
Most of the PHP applications are not stateless,
they use session data

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Persistent load balancer
● A client request is assigned always to the same
server (means same session/local data)
●
Pros:
▶ No software architecture changes
●
Cons:
▶No fault tolerant, if a server goes down the
session data are lost!
▶The load balancer is the bottleneck
▶The persistent load balancer are expensive

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Share the session data
● Manage the session data across the servers
●
Pros:
▶ Fault tolerant, if a server goes down the load
balancer can user another server
▶ No bottleneck in the load balancer
▶ The stateless load balancer are cheaper
●
Cons:
▶
Software architecture changes

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PHP session management

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Sessions in PHP

●
Session support in PHP consists of a way to preserve certain
data across subsequent accesses
●
To identify the subsequent accesses, from the same client,
PHP uses a cookie variable (PHPSESSID)
▶ Example: PHPSESSID= tclq3an1ri8dsfiuo43845loo1
●
By default, session data are stored in the file system of the
server
●
In PHP we manage the session data using the $_SESSION
global variable

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PHP session management

●
Configure the PHP session management (php.ini directives):
▶ session.name
●
name of the session cookie identifier
(PHPSESSID by default)
▶ session.save_handler
●
defines the name of the handler which is used
for storing and retrieving data associated with
a session (files by default).
▶ session.save_path
●
defines the argument which is passed to the
save handler (with files handler is the path to
store the session data)

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Example (PHP sessions using files)

●
<?php
session_start();
$_SESSION['user']= 'enrico';

●
In session folder (for instance, /tmp) the PHP creates a file
named sess_fvi9r84f14sjel8r28o6aqspr2 (where
fvi9r84f14sjel8r28o6aqspr2 is PHPSESSID) that contains:

user|s:6:"enrico";

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Share session data

● How to share PHP sessions between multiple

servers?
Using
▶ a Network File System
Using
▶ a Database
Using
▶ Memcached
Using
▶ Redis
Using
▶
Zend Server Cluster Manager
▶ etc

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session_set_save_handler()

●
You can write your PHP session handler using
the session_set_save_handler():

bool session_set_save_handler (
callback $open,
callback $close,
callback $read,
callback $write,
callback $destroy,
callback $gc)
●
More info: http://php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-save-handler.php

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Session sharing
using NFS

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Session sharing using NFS

● Use the default PHP session handler

(session.session_handler= files)
●
NFS to store the session data files
(session.save_path= NFS folder)
●
Pros:
▶ No changes on the PHP side
●
Cons:
▶ Highly inefficient
▶ Not designed for high read/write ratio
▶ Performance problems and data corruptions
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Session sharing
using Database

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Session sharing using DB
● Use the user PHP session handler
(session.session_handler= user)
●
Use the session_set_save_handler() to implement
your db session handler
●
Which db?
▶ MySQL
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-save-handler.php#81761

▶ Ms SQL Server
●http://www.zimuel.it/blog/?p=402
▶ PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc

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Session sharing using DB (2)
●
Pros:
▶ Solves the scalability limitation
▶ A lot of best practices available
▶ Wide installation base
▶ DB is (normally) available
●
Cons:
▶Sessions have almost 1:1 read/write ratio
▶Connection overhead
▶Single point of failure
▶Performance bottleneck
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 Session sharing
using Memcached

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Session sharing using Memcached

● Use the memcached PHP session handler

(session.session_handler= memcache)
●
Pros:
▶ Native session handler
▶ Very fast (works in RAM)
▶ Can be clustered
●
Cons:
▶No persistent data (it's a caching system)
▶Cyclic memory (data can be overwritten if the
memory is full)
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Session sharing
using Redis

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What is Redis?
●
Redis is an open-source,
networked, in-memory, persistent,
journaled, key-value data store
(NoSQL).
●
It's similar to memcached but the
dataset is not volatile
●
Developed by: Salvatore Sanfilippo
●
Sponsored by vmware
●
http://code.google.com/p/redis/

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Session sharing using Redis
● Different PHP extensions for Redis:
▶ Predis, http://github.com/nrk/predis/
▶ Rediska, http://rediska.geometria-lab.net/
▶ redis.php, http://github.com/antirez/redisdotphp
▶ PHPRedis!, http://github.com/owlient/phpredis
●
Custom session handler for Redis:
▶http://github.com/ivanstojic/redis-session-php

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 Session sharing using Redis (2)
●
Pros:
▶ Fast (works in RAM)
▶ Reliable (master-slave replication)
●
Cons:
PHP Redis extensions are 0.x version
▶

Custom PHP session handler

▶

Not so scalable* (data are stored in RAM)

▶

No High Availability* (master-slave limitation)

▶

* but Redis developers are working on a Cluster version!

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 Session sharing
using Zend Server
Cluster Manager

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What is Zend Server and Cluster Manager?

●
Zend Server is a complete, enterprise-ready
Web Application Server for running and
managing PHP applications that require a
high level of reliability, performance and
security on Linux, Windows or IBM i.
●
Zend Server Cluster Manager (ZSCM)
extends the benefits of Zend Server across
large-scale PHP deployments.
●
With ZSCM you can build a real PHP cluster
stack.

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Session sharing with ZSCM

●
Session Clustering Extension
●
Session Clustering Daemon (SCD)
●
Storage backends: Disk / Memory
●
Peer-to-peer protocol to communicate
between nodes
●
Session management
with master-backup
architecture

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Zend Server Cluster Manager architecture

Load Balancer Firewall

MySQL

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High availability: session cluster

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High availability: session cluster (2)

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Session cluster with ZSCM
●
Pros:
▶ Very Fast
▶ Reliable (data are stored in master-backup
servers)
▶ High Availability
▶ Scalable (session data are stored in all the
nodes of the cluster)
▶
No changes to the PHP code
●
Cons:
▶ You need Zend Server on each node of the
cluster

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Questions?

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Thank you for attending!

More info:
http://www.zend.com
http://phpconference.es

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