It’s been a year since I last made any major changes to my WordPress on Heroku build and in tech years that’s a lifetime. Since then Heroku has released a new PHP buildpack with nginx and HHVM built in. Much progress have also been made both HHVM and WordPress to make both compatible with each other. So it seems like now is as good a time as any to update the stack this site is running on.

So without further ado I like to introduce:

Heroku WP — A template for HHVM powered WordPress served by nginx.

The Goal

There are numerous other templates out there for running WordPress on Heroku and my main goals for this templates are:

It should be simple — use the default buildpack provided by Heroku so there’s no other 3rd party dependency to implicitly trust or to maintain. It should be fast — use the latest technologies available to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of each Heroku Dyno. It should be secure — security is not an add-on, admin pages should be secure by default and database connections needs to be encrypted. It should scale — just because we can serve millions of page hits a day off a single Heroku Dyno does not mean we’ll stop there. The template should be made with cloud architecture in mind so that the number of Dynos can scale up and down without breaking.

The Stack

Standing on the shoulder of giants I was able to use the latest Heroku buildpack and get WordPress running on:

NGINX — An event driven web server that was engineered for the modern day to replace Apache. This high performance web server is preferred by more top 1,000 sites then any other and it’s what’s used by the largest WordPress install out there, WordPress.com.

HHVM — HipHop Virtual Machine, a JIT (just in time) compiler developed by Facebook to run PHP scripts which when tested with WordPress showed up to a 2x improvement.

I have yet to run any statical analysis on performance however antidotally it feels a lot faster navigating WP admin and page generation times looks much better. I’m looking forward to running more tests and performance tuning this build in the coming weeks.

Update:

While still not a head-to-head test looking at the response times as reported by StatusCake for this site running on Heroku-WP and a mirror of this site that is running on the old Heroku LAMP stack with no load other then StatusCake pings shows a dramatic improvement:

Stack Max Min LAMP 3,514 1,166 Heroku-WP 1,351 68