PHP 8.1 build - It's the latest/greatest/fastest and we're anxious to start using it.

[olstjos]

Locally I've tested my code using wodby on PHP 8.1 and 8.0, having a bit of trouble getting the s2i working in openshift/red hat for PHP 8.0, with that said, I'd much rather spend all this time getting PHP 8.1 going, any chance that PHP 8.1 builds will be ready soon? There's additional performance improvements and reduced memory footprint available by using the latest and greatest PHP.

https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks/

[pkubatrh]

Hi there @olstjos,
seems like the first module builds for PHP 8.1 are hitting Centos Stream 9 so we will be able to start working on the c9s version of the image quite soon. So if you are okay with using Centos Stream images, be on the lookout for the new image.

[joejoseph00]

Hello @pkubatrh I've got PHP 8.2.1 up and running with Ubuntu and it's blazingly fast compared to 7.4/8.0, takes even less memory than PHP 8.1 and is once again significantly faster than the previous version of PHP (8.1).

We need to get at least PHP 8.1 going here with the s2i-php-container because we're trying to run hundreds of pods on razor thin resources and we need to squeeze every single byte of ram and every cpu cycle to the maximum. Our cloud billing is huge, our apps need to be faster and we need to get PHP 8.1 going asap. PHP 8.0 will be end of life this year so we need to at least get started on PHP 8.1.

We're not running a bank with custom software, (we're not a bank) we are running cutting edge publicly available open source software and we need to stay current with security advisory releases and be ready for upgrades and everything the world is throwing at us. Every extra bit of performance is improved availability and allows us to deal better with bots and concurrency and keep latency low.

[pkubatrh]

Hi @joejoseph00
PHP 8.1 has been available on RHEL9 for a good while, feel free to give it a try: https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/ubi9/php-81/62e8e662f6d3d47e19779b01

Edit: Double checking the image it seems there is only 8.0 inside :/ Let me take a look and check what is wrong.

[joejoseph00]

Hi @pkubatrh thanks so much for looking into this.
We are using a stack that requires Zend supported releases in order to continue getting security and feature updates.

PHP 8.0 will become EOL on november 26th 2023, and we need to start developing on beta releases long before this EOL date. As developers we need to be as far ahead of EOL as possible so that we can achieve our deliverables on time. On november 26th 2023 we will lose access to upgrades of older version dependencies that we need to keep our production applications secure and long before this EOL date we also lose access to new functionality of the open source dependencies we rely on unless we develop using other platforms outside of the RHEL space.

Extended support option of out of support versions of PHP is not an ideal option for us because

1. Newer versions of PHP consume less memory than older versions
2. Newer versions of PHP provide significant performance improvements than older versions
3. Newer versions of PHP are required by updated dependencies
4. Newer versions of PHP such as 8.1.14 and PHP 8.2.1 are already used in production environments elsewhere and we would greatly benefit from having these versions available in the sclorg image.
5. Security updates of dependencies we are using require Zend supported versions of PHP
6. We need to develop new releases prior to deploying them so developers need to stay far ahead of the EOL curve.

[joejoseph00]

@pkubatrh When I spoke with Red Hat representatives they had mentioned late fall, early winter 2022 for PHP 8.1 however now it is January 2023. Is there an updated timeline estimate? Any commitment?

Is there an updated delivery schedule for PHP 8.1 ? How soon before the EOL (End of life) of PHP 8.0? Can we expect this to be at least 6 months prior to the end of life of PHP 8.0 which will be november 26th 2023? And for PHP 8.2, is there a delivery timeline estimate for this also?

six months prior to end of life of PHP 8.0 would be approximately May 26th 2023

[pkubatrh]

PHP 8.1 should have been available in winter 2022, but there was an issue with how the image was being built, so it still has PHP 8.0 inside, not 8.1 as expected. This should be fixed in the coming weeks. So yes, definitely before May 2023.

[olstjos]

@pkubatrh Hi Petr, I got wind from Andrew of Red Hat that they fixed the glitch, does this mean we're almost ready to get the PHP 8.1 added to the s2i-php-container ?

[joejoseph00]

Wow great to see this get done, looking forward to it! We'll test it out once it's merged.

[olstjos]

Thank you @phracek and @pkubatrh for resolving this, I will test this out soon I hope.

[joejoseph00]

Thanks @phracek and @pkubatrh :)

[joejoseph00]

PHP 8.1 is old news , PHP 8.3 is 53% faster on Drupal than compared with PHP 8.1 and Kinstas benchmarking.
#435