Usually I am very conservative about upgrading in production even partial. But the moto “PHP 7 is not an evolution is a revolution” made me want to try it also in production in just one specific folder that serves few sites. Here are my first two observations about things that are not being said about PHP 7 and someone should take care of them. I hope to write more in future and other folks contribute with solutions / other views / more things someone should keep his mind on while upgrading.

  • opcache.so in PHP7 ini is still zend_extension and not extension

  • If you are using ImageMagick think it twice , it is near to impossible to make it work in an environment that run prior versions to PHP7 and very hard to make it work even if you have only PHP7. (Still I haven't make it work)

  • Fatal errors are still there with a way you couldn't imagine. If you use set_error_handler
    to catch errors (in order to throw a proper exception) and differentiate them to fatal or no fatal
    ini_get("error_reporting") along with if exists code of the message will not do the work. You have to evaluate the code to figure out if it were in fact a fatal error a warning or something else.

( a small notice , I haven't seen the “extremely” speed difference although OpCache is running and hold memory (this is not problem there is more than enough) but the speed might be around 3% to 5% percent faster comparing to PHP 5.5 without OpCache (I will have more stats on this) , of course I am talking about code that was allready optimized)

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Rule of thumb for enterprise systems - NEVER do an upgrade to version 0 of anything. PHP 7.0 is no exception to this rule! That said, your feedback to the PHP development community may be helpful.

commented: I agree 100% . It was 7.0.1 and in a small part of production +9

I suspect that in a short while, PHP 7.x will be very solid. Keep testing it out until then! :-)

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Useful to know guys. Keep posting issues here. I noticed that XAMPP has now rolled out v7, whereas I was looking at Bitnami previously - but they were still recommending the 5.5.30 install - not even the 5.6.x!
I've also seen a number of hosts jump onto the 7-brigade, but few of them have any info about pitfalls with hosting a live site when upgrading from 5.5/6.
Am considering installing 7 locally to run alongside 5.6.x, but not sure if I can be bothered with all the setup at the mo for such a young release. Am going to watch this space for a little while I think.

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