Benchmarking

YiiPress uses PHPBench to track performance regressions.

Generating benchmark data

Generate 10,000 small test entries (default):

make bench-generate

Generate 1,000 realistic entries (~27KB each, with links, images, tables, styled text):

make bench-generate-realistic

Custom entry count:

make bench-generate 5000

Generated data is stored in benchmarks/data/ and is gitignored.

Running benchmarks

Run all benchmarks:

make bench

Run a specific benchmark class:

BENCH_FILTER=LargeContentBuildBench make bench

Profile the public build command with Xdebug:

make profile-build CLI_ARGS='build --content-dir=benchmarks/data/content --output-dir=runtime/profile-output --workers=1 --no-cache'

Print build phase timings without Xdebug:

make yii CLI_ARGS='build --content-dir=benchmarks/data/content --output-dir=runtime/profile-output --workers=4 --no-cache --profile'

Render the full build path without writing site output files:

make yii CLI_ARGS='build --content-dir=benchmarks/data/content --output-dir=runtime/profile-output --workers=4 --no-cache --no-write --profile'

Use --profile for quick before/after checks while optimizing. Use make profile-build when call-level attribution is needed.
Use --no-write to separate render/template/processor cost from output directory and file writing cost.
Profiler timings include instrumentation overhead; use Xdebug-disabled benchmarks for timing comparisons.
To profile a changed-entry build, first build an isolated fixture/output directory normally, edit one entry,
then run make profile-build with the same content and output paths, without --no-cache.

CI compares against master with a 10% regression threshold. Both checkouts use the current public-CLI
build benchmark definitions so fixture setup, warmup, and timed workloads are identical. The baseline
still uses its own engine implementation.

Benchmark classes

• ContentParserBench — measures parsing speed for site config, navigation, collections, authors, and entries (with and without body loading)
• MarkdownRendererBench — measures iliaal/mdparser markdown-to-HTML rendering for short and long documents
• SyntaxHighlighterBench — measures the reusable highlighter package path for plain HTML, raw code, a single highlighted block, and a page with many highlighted blocks
• QuestionProcessorBench — measures pages with 100 Markdown question blocks in inline and heading-grouped modes
• AssetFingerprintingBench — measures fingerprint lookup and HTML asset URL rewriting
• DirectoryRemoverBench — compares build-output cleanup with yiisoft/files on 10,000 page directories; setup is outside timing, with one revision and no warmup because removal is destructive
• BuildProfileBench — measures overhead of disabled and enabled build phase timers
• OEmbedProcessorBench — measures standalone URL-to-embed expansion across pluggable oEmbed providers
• SmallSiteBuildBench — measures the public yii build command end to end on 10k small entries, including full rebuilds, no-write renders, and incremental rebuilds
• LargeContentBuildBench — measures the public yii build command end to end on 1k realistic entries (~27KB each), including full rebuilds, no-write renders, and incremental rebuilds

Current results (8 September 2026)

10k small entries (~1 KB each)

1k realistic entries (~27 KB each)

These end-to-end benchmarks intentionally go through the public CLI entry point instead of internal renderer/parser classes,
so they track real rebuild timing rather than component-only throughput.

Results were measured on the performance branch in Docker on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
(16 cores, 32 threads), using PHP 8.5.10, PHPBench 1.7.0, ext-mdparser, ext-yaml, and ext-pcntl,
with Xdebug off and CLI OPCache enabled. Tables report modal estimates and relative standard deviation
from five iterations, with one measured build per iteration. Timings depend on hardware and filesystem.

Full rebuilds use --no-cache and one warmup, so measured builds include replacing existing output.
Unchanged incremental builds also use one warmup. Fixture setup and teardown are outside the measured
invocation.

Single-entry edit benchmarks build the site and append a newline to one entry during setup, outside
the timer. They intentionally have no Warmup attribute (PHPBench defaults to zero warmup calls) and
use exactly one timed revision, which consumes the pending edit. Additional warmups or revisions would
measure unchanged rebuilds. Do not override --warmup or --revs for these subjects. PHPBench 1.7.0
rejects the CLI override --warmup=0, so use the benchmark's default configuration instead.

PHPUnit regression coverage checks PHPBench's effective metadata, including setup ordering, to prevent
warmups or multiple revisions from consuming the edit before the intended measurement.

make bench CLI_ARGS="'--filter=benchFullRebuild|benchIncrementalNoChanges' --iterations=5 --report=aggregate"
make bench CLI_ARGS='--filter=benchIncrementalSingleChangedEntry --iterations=5 --report=aggregate'

UI translation lookup microbenchmarks (9 September 2026), using the same environment with
100,000 revisions and seven iterations per subject:

These measure warmed catalog lookup, excluding translation-file loading. Run them with:

make bench CLI_ARGS='--filter=UiTextBench --revs=100000 --iterations=7 --report=aggregate'

PortableWorkerPoolBench tracks the startup and job-transport overhead of two portable worker processes used by parallel builds.

Benchmarks are run with xdebug disabled automatically (make bench sets XDEBUG_MODE=off).