Racing Rector

The next episode of the PHP performance series:

After bringing a performance boost to PHPStan in Speedzember and a side step in Diff Speeding lets have a look how the fastest Rector version ever was created.

Kick start

If you are interested in how I start a performance investigation, please read the previous mentioned articles beforehand. They will give you a idea on how I approach such a task.

symfony GlobResource

Looking at the profiles of my workload I noticed that Rector had a bottleneck at file IO operations.

IO means input/output and is a term for operations which read or write data from/to a file, network, database, …

With this finding in mind I had a closer look at the file-finding stage and saw considerable time was spent there.

The file traversal utilizes symfony GlobResource class, and looking into it made me realize that we could re-order some operations. This means - where possible - I changed the code so file IO was only triggered after all other operations succeeded.

The result is a ~18% performance improvement in symfony GlobResource which in turn will make a lot of code faster relying on the symfony-config component - obviously even outside of Rector.

grafik

Later on this optimization was mentioned on the symfony blog: New in Symfony 6.3: Performance Improvements

Defer IO

The initial profile revealed a few more small costs, which I worked through with some small pull requests:

Bottom line of these changes is:

Don’t do IO when not necessary
Try to defer IO when possible
Do non-IO related stuff before IO related stuff - cheap checks first

File IO is not only expensive but also very unpredictable. Executing the same workload over and over on the same machine can vary a lot.

Defer type resolving and AST traversal

In a similar fashion as in the paragraph before, there is another class of operations which can be slow in static analysis context. We are talking about type resolving - e.g. $scope->getType() and friends - or AST traversal - e.g. $nodeFinder->find(…) or $nodeTraverser->traverse(…).

Examples for this approach can be found in

and some of them were really fruitful:

grafik

Summary

In the above I described just a few things I had a look at. The sum of all these - and a lot more not mentioned here at all - lead to a really awesome Rector 0.16 release:

Also be aware that not all my changes improve things and some ideas will just be put into the trash-bin after a few hours. Feel free to look through the full list… not all things I try are successful or land in the project in the end.

💡Tip: Don’t apply the above concepts blindly to your code. Make sure you have evidence with some sort of timing tool (e.g. a profiler) before diving deep into the performance optimizing process. As you can see in most PRs: oftentimes only a few lines of code need to be tweaked. The actual challenge is to find those in between a few hundred thousand/million lines of code.

Chances are high, that you or your company is saving a lot of money with recent releases. Please consider supporting my work, so I can make sure open source tools keeps as fast as possible and evolves to the next level.

Found a bug? Please help improve this article.

Diff Speeding

How To Debug Slow Rector Projects