How Badoo Saved $1M by Migrating Hundreds of Servers to PHP 7
Badoo migrated its massive PHP codebase to PHP 7 across hundreds of servers, overcoming engine bugs, HHVM limitations, and extension incompatibilities, while revamping testing infrastructure and deployment processes, ultimately achieving up to 40% faster response times, eight‑fold memory reduction, and roughly one million dollars in cost savings.
We (Badoo) successfully migrated a multi‑hundred‑machine PHP application to PHP 7, becoming one of the first companies to switch at this scale. During the migration we discovered and helped fix several PHP 7 bytecode‑cache bugs, confirming that PHP 7 can now run stably in production with lower memory usage and significantly higher performance.
HHVM Trial
Before adopting PHP 7 we evaluated HHVM. After a few weeks of warm‑up, HHVM showed a three‑fold increase in speed and CPU usage, but it suffered from deployment difficulty, lack of runkit support, incomplete PHP 5.5 compatibility, and high maintenance cost, leading us to reject it.
Migration Plan
Modify PHP build/deployment infrastructure and adjust code for many extensions.
Change infrastructure and testing environment.
Refactor PHP application code.
Engine and Extension Changes
Key engine changes in PHP 7 include:
zval pointer replaced by zval on the stack.
char* replaced by zend_string, improving string handling.
Array API now uses zend_string keys and a more compact storage layout.
These changes reduce small memory allocations and yield about a 2% speed increase for the engine.
Testing Infrastructure
Our testing pipeline runs 60,000 tests daily, with around 6 × 10⁴ unit tests (≈50% coverage) executed in the cloud in 2–3 minutes. We also run integration, system, Selenium, and Calabash tests. To replace runkit we introduced SoftMocks , a pure‑PHP library that dynamically rewrites code at runtime, providing method overriding, function result overriding, constant modification, and class method addition.
Results
After migration, response times dropped by roughly 40%, memory usage fell by more than eight times, and CPU load decreased to under 50% on large clusters. The performance charts below illustrate response time distribution, CPU usage, memory consumption, and CPU load for the mobile backend cluster.
Overall, the migration saved roughly $1 million by reducing the number of servers needed (about 300 servers) and cutting hosting costs, while also improving user experience.
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