vBulletin 4 & PHP 7 - drastic speed improvement!

[Dave]

Refer to my blog post in case you want to make vBulletin 4 work on PHP 7 as well:
https://blog.technidev.com/vbulletin...aking-it-work/

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http://www.zend.com/en/resources/php...ow-about-php-7

So PHP 7 has been released and it offers significant new features, including drastic speed changes (2 times faster according to Zend!).

As expected, PHP 7 doesn't work with vBulletin 4. The main reason is because of "methods with the same name as their class will not be constructors in a future version of PHP" and a couple of other things. So for example, the class vB_Database may not have a method name called vB_Database that's used as a constructor.

Since I have the latest vBulletin 4 version installed and I don't expect any new version of vBulletin 4 anytime soon, I'll probably give it a shot and modify my forum to see if I can make it work with PHP 7.

I will definitely document the speed changes and let you guys know the results.
Anyone else who may be interested in this?

--------------- Added [DATE]1449314753[/DATE] at [TIME]1449314753[/TIME] ---------------

After a couple of modifications, I managed to make vBulletin 4 work with PHP 7... and wow it loads so much faster. More than 2 times faster with PHP 7 and the OPCache module... wow. My mind is blown.

Note that all the numbers below are based on the TTFB (Time To First Byte).

Before the upgrade (PHP 5.4.45)
Homepage
409.31 - 429.84 - 389.37 - 401.51 - 389.75 - 426.69
~407.75ms average loading time

Forum Category
518.51 - 491.49 - 447.64 - 491.94 - 433.52 - 543.93
~487.84ms average loading time

Thread
326.34 - 399.72 - 387.09 - 383.79 - 370.03 - 375.21
~373.70ms average loading time

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After the upgrade (PHP 7 WITHOUT OPCache)
Homepage
289.79 - 291.41 - 289.11 - 253.45 - 285.06 - 259.98
~278.13ms average loading time

Forum Category
281.83 - 333.31 - 293.23 - 276.73 - 268.91 - 281.63
~289.27ms average loading time

Thread
221.73 - 344.83 - 257.84 - 250.72 - 250.04 - 220.07
~257.53ms average loading time

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After the upgrade (PHP 7 WITH OPCache)
Homepage
225.63 - 200.26 - 219.48 - 181.72 - 199.93 - 177.55
~200.76ms average loading time

Forum Category
194.95 - 184.47 - 237.45 - 182.62 - 185.93 - 178.06
~193.91ms average loading time

Thread
207.83 - 156.41 - 146.43 - 143.13 - 155.13 - 142.61
~158.59ms average loading time