On Monday, Badoo blogged about its migration to PHP7 (https://techblog.badoo.com/blog/2016/03/14/how-badoo-saved-one-million-dollars-switching-to-php7/</a>). Those are great results! At @AtrapaloEng, we’re running already tests in production to perform the same step. We could have started some months before, but we’ve been struggling with the php-msgpack extension and its (un)support for PHP7. We hope to deploy PHP7 in all our server during this week but we would like to share with you what we have seen so far. What we have done is adding another FPM node with the same capabilities as the current ones running in production with PHP 5.6. The new node is getting the same amount of traffic as the other ones. No special configurations or tweaks such as Huge Pages, just PHP7 upgrade. Data after more than 24 hours running.

Atrápalo is a travel e-commerce website founded in 2000. Based in Barcelona, Spain, it sells flights, trips, tickets, booking restaurants, car renting, etc. to 10 different countries. It’s a 9000 world Alexa ranking and it’s running PHP. Since 2014, we are pushing hard in order to evolve technically using best practices, agile methodologies and distributed architectures. One of the key aspects is the framework.

We are currently migrating to Symfony in order to speed up the development process and reduce the maintenance costs. We are doing it progressively, step by step, without rewriting the whole application, no green-field project, without any dedicated team neither. All developers are involved in this process, and by policy, each new feature is developed using Symfony while the old features remain served by the old framework.

I would say this process is going quite smoothly, without pain. Based on some emails and tweets I have received, here are some tricks about how we are doing it. Hope it helps!