PHP7 is out and promise great performance to all PHP-applications.

I tried it out this weekend on my Observium-installation and it did not disappoint!

I have a rather large Observium and some of you that runs very large installations may have noticed that the web UI can get a little slow when rendering all the stuff from a large database.

In my case the overview-page loads in about 5s and some of the more heavy pages like /devices/ takes about 7s to load.

Well after upgrading to PHP7 my page loadtimes are now down to <1.5s for almost any page and atleast <2s for the heavy ones, I got a 2-3x performance boost!

If you want to try it out I made a quick guide on how to run Observium on PHP7 here: http://blog.best-practice.se/2015/12/vastly-improve-observium-performance.html

Note that I don't know if everything in Observium is fully compatible with PHP7, I tried as many features as I could think of with no problems, however I have not tried the billing-module.

Even if most of you don't have need for a speedup in the web UI, its great to see PHP improve performance like this.

This means Observium will be able to scale even further in the future :) 

/Markus