Software and Games Updated to PHP 8.2

We would like to announce that our software and games have been recently updated to use  PHP 8.2 and we have integrated several PHP extensions/APIs which are meant to boost performance.

According to recent testing,  PHP 8.2 aims to bring a 15% performance boost compared to  PHP 7.4 (former version used in our software).

MemCached was enabled and we also changed the server API from CGI to PHP-FPM.
PHP JIT was also enabled in some tests.

Results when activating PHP-FPM and MemCached
1)  PHP-FPM JIT ( Memcached Enabled) = 0.022sec average over 10,000 records
vs  PHP-FPM JIT ( Memcached Disabled) =  0.027sec average over 10000 records
Conclusion: MemCached brings stable increased performance of 25% performance and reduces database load

2) PHP-FPM JIT MemCached =  0.022sec average over 10,000 records
vs
CGI JIT MemCached  0.029sec average over 10000 records
Conclusion: PHP-FPM brings stable increased performance of 30%

3) PHP-FPM (0.003sec - fastest time) vs  PHP-FASTCGI (0.1sec - fastest time)
Conclusion: PHP-FPM brings up to  300% performance increase in some rare scenarios

In total we can see a performance increase of (((x 15%) 25%) 30%) = 85% when using PHP 8.2 PHP-FPM MemCached JIT, compared to when using PHP 7.4 and none of these extensions/APIs.

The tests above were done by using a benchmark script that simulates a gameplay in a slot game (we simulated a SPIN in a slot game).
 

The tests mentioned above and the response times were made using a Cloud VPS Server with 8GB RAM and 4 CPU cores, priced at only  100$/month. The purpose of the tests was to compare the impact of PHP-FPM, JIT and MemCached compared to when these would not be used.
 

Performance would raise substantially if using a Dedicated server, but the monthly server costs would increase as well.

When performing our tests, we noticed that a  100$/month server could handle 100 concurrent players (all clicking SPIN in the same second, in a slot game) which means 230million gameplays in a month. With a 2% house edge, it would mean a profit of 5.2m$/month if this traffic would be constant.
The server was able to handle a peak traffic of 200 players requests/second.

We recommend to all our customers to use a Dedicated server with at least 32GB RAM and 16x cores which would cost around  275$ (with discount). A dedicated server comes with better configuration fine-tuning, and it comes with a lot of resources only for your website, whereas in a Cloud environment, the resources are shared. Such server should be able to easily handle up to 1000 concurrent users (all clicking SPIN in the same second, in a slot game). That could mean up to 16m$ profit.
 

PHP 8.2 introduces enhancements to the type system, providing more expressive and precise type-safety. It also introduces read-only classes, support for sensitive parameter redaction, a new random extension, and a host of other features. These changes aim to modernize and streamline the PHP language.

PHP 8.2 represents a significant milestone in the ongoing modernization of PHP. Alongside the exciting new features and improvements, this version deprecates support for dynamic class properties, issues warnings for certain non-optimal INI configuration values, and addresses legacy PHP behaviors that impact array sorting and specific types of string transformation/encoding operations.

We would like to also bring to your attention that the frontend of all of our games was also updated recently to use the latest PIXIJS version (PixiJS 7.2) which improved the frontend performance during gameplay and also the loading times of the games when they are opened.

At the moment, all of our products use the most up-to-date software versions. We will continue to seek further ways to optimize the performance of our code and to enhance the functionality of our software.