In 2014 Etsy’s infrastructure group was handed a challenge: scale Etsy’s API cluster 20x. Many efforts were simultaneously undertaken to meet this challenge, including a migration to HHVM after it showed a promising 5x increase in throughput. While getting our code to run on HHVM was easy, working through the deployment and operationalization proved to be a more difficult challenge.

This was presented at the PHP UK 2015 Conference.