HHVM has significantly changed the way PHP sites are optimized for performance. Right now it is probably the fastest stable execution engine for PHP scripts. However, with PHP 7 on the horizon things may change and HHVM may face a serious competitor as according to some benchmarking tests and those disclosed by Zend, PHP 7 is much faster than HHVM.

Important: Even though it’s stable, PHP 7.0 is still in beta and it’s not recommended that you use it on live websites. In addition, it does not yet have Memcache support which means that if you want to use the SuperCacher and PHP7, you need to disable the Memcache option from the plugin backend before switching to PHP7.

Why Should You Use PHP 7?

The main advantage of PHP 7 is that it is much faster than any of the available PHP 5.x releases. The fact that PHP 7 provides opcode caching by default is the main reason for the performance improvements provided by PHP 7.

How To Activate PHP 7 on a SiteGround server?

Here at SiteGround we believe that our clients should have access to the latest technologies as soon as those technologies are stable enough for secure usage. That is why we have added the latest PHP 7 beta version to all our servers.

You can activate PHP 7 directly from the PHP Version Manager in cPanel or by adding a line in your .htaccess file. The PHP 7 OpCache functionality is enabled by default. The folder which is used by PHP 7 to store the opcache is:

If you want to clear the cache you can simply delete the whole .opcache directory.

Are Any Issues Expected?

We have tested default installations of some of the most popular apps (WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, etc.) and we did not notice issues. However, as PHP 7 is the largest shift in PHP technology since the upgrade to PHP 5.3, issues will occur for sure. In PHP 7 many things have been changed and some functions have been deprecated so developers may check this article by Cal Evans from Zend for more information about the backwards compatibility issues that could occur.

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