PHP 7.3 Upgrade: Performance Benefits and Planning

We’re pleased to be upgrading the VIP Go platform to PHP 7.3 to improve the stability, security, and performance of your VIP sites. From initial testing, we’re seeing a 5-10 percent reduction in page generation time, combined with a 5-10 percent reduction in CPU load.

As always, we are committed to bringing you these improvements while maintaining the stability and minimizing any potential impact to your live sites. At this time, we’ve begun scanning VIP code to identify any potential incompatibilities. If we find an issue of concern with your site or sites, we’ll reach out and let you know.

Schedule

  • February 4, 2019: Upgrade of non-production environments on VIP Go to PHP 7.3. During this phase we’ll work with you to fix compatibility errors and warnings that could negatively impact your site. Want to upgrade your non-production environments sooner? Open a support ticket and let us know.
  • February 25, 2019: Upgrade of production environments on VIP Go to PHP 7.3.

What’s New in PHP 7.3?

New language features include a more flexible syntax for heredoc and nowdoc, improved error handling, and a new warning on continue statements that target switch structures. For more, see the full PHP 7.3 migration guide.

How Do I Prepare?

You can start preparing for the upgrade to PHP 7.3 by doing the following:

  1. Upgrade your local development environments to PHP 7.3.
  2. Add the PHPCompatibilityWP ruleset to your PHPCS implementation, and set a testVersion of 7.2-; this will flag any issues related to compatibility with 7.2 or higher. Are you making use of Git submodules? If so, we recommend scanning those as well.
  3. VIP is also adding this ruleset to the VIP Code Analysis bot, to scan new PRs for compatibility. You can use the bot’s warnings as an opportunity to fix any potential issues prior to the platform-wide upgrade.
  4. Review and act on any warnings or compatibility issues raised by our team as we pro-actively review client sites.

Further Questions

Finally, if you have PHP 7.3-incompatible errors in your theme code, you may have already heard from us about it — or you’ll be hearing about it shortly. Please make sure your development team reviews and acts on any PHP 7.3 tickets from VIP. If you have questions, please open a ticket, and we’ll be happy to assist.

For Reference