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HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) vs Varnish: What are the differences?
Developers describe HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) as "An open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP". HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the flexibility that PHP developers are accustomed to. To date, HHVM (and its predecessor HPHPc before it) has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the PHP 5.2 engine + APC. On the other hand, Varnish is detailed as "High-performance HTTP accelerator". Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and Varnish are primarily classified as "Virtual Machine" and "Web Cache" tools respectively.
"Very fast" is the primary reason why developers consider HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) over the competitors, whereas "High-performance" was stated as the key factor in picking Varnish.
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and Varnish are both open source tools. It seems that HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) with 16K GitHub stars and 2.85K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Varnish with 908 GitHub stars and 216 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Varnish has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1003 company stacks & 135 developers stacks; compared to HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), which is listed in 33 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.
Pros of HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)
- Very fast30
- Drop-in PHP replacement24
- Works well with nginx14
- Backed by Facebook14
- Open source12
- Statically checked, typed language1
Pros of Varnish
- High-performance104
- Very Fast67
- Very Stable57
- Very Robust44
- HTTP reverse proxy37
- Open Source21
- Web application accelerator18
- Easy to config11
- Widely Used5
- Great community4
- Essential software for HTTP2