IPO-bound Etsy shows how HHVM has boosted its data center efficiency

Etsy has become a major player in online retail, having racked up 54 million members and more than $108 million in annual revenue. So a whole lot is riding on the company’s underlying technology infrastructure.

Today Etsy — which is expected to go public on the Nasdaq later this month — is opening up about some of the things its engineers have done in recent years to improve the performance of its application and boost the efficiency of the company’s data centers.

Major web companies, like Facebook and Amazon, have previously talked about how they’ve taken great measures to improve their own operations.

Now Etsy software engineer Dan Miller, in a blog post today, is showing off some of Etsy’s recent accomplishments, particularly as a result of adopting the open-source HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) for running PHP applications, which Facebook originally created.

“In short, Etsy saw 2x in performance from using HHVM, and ended up not having to purchase any more servers or space in their data center,” an Etsy spokeswoman wrote in an email to VentureBeat, referring to the blog post.

Incidentally, Box, which went public in January, talked just a few months ago about how it experienced performance gains as a result of its adoption of HHVM.

In Etsy’s case, the idea was to be ready for more oncoming web traffic as the company continues to grow. Last year the company’s infrastructure team was told to increase the traffic capacity of the Etsy application programming interface by a factor of 20, Miller wrote in today’s blog post. Moving from standard PHP to PHP that works with HHVM was one change the team made to meet its goal.

Before rolling out the HHVM-based Etsy API to the world, the team first used it to handle traffic from Etsy employees, Miller wrote. The team found bugs related to HHVM extensions. More problems popped up as the team started sending some traffic to the recast API. But after that, the team did immediately find a real benefit: The new API is responding more quickly than the good old PHP API.

Above: HHVM vs PHP on Etsy’s internal API

Image Credit: Etsy

But more importantly, the new API could handle greater throughput, which is the metric the company was most concerned with.

“HHVM met our expectations,” Miller wrote. “We were able to realize a greater throughput on our API cluster, as well as improved performance. Buying fewer servers also means less waste and less power consumption in our data centers, which is important to Etsy as a Benefit Corporation.”

Read Miller’s full blog post to learn more about the results of Etsy’s use of HHVM.