I’m bringing up a new server and decided to give HHVM a shot for PHP processing. Having watched WordPress’s trac for several years now I’ve seen a couple of small and some very large things that needed to be changed in order for WordPress to run without issue. But now it seems to be pretty stable and all unit tests (as far as I know) are passing without issue. As can be seen in my other two posts installing HHVM on Ubuntu is relatively easy and configuring Nginx is also trivial.

The first four or five sites that I ported (copied) from Apache/PHP to Nginx/HHVM came over without issue but the last one I ported broke and it broke hard. Attempting to access the site caused a white screen of death and it took a while to trace the error logged in /var/log/hhvm/ related to the Debug Bar extension. Debugging was taking too long so I just switched over to PHP-FPM and everything’s working again. I think the issue was the same as listed in this post.

Does anyone know how to avoid the white screen of death from HHVM? Is there a way to turn screen logging of errors on similar to a default install of PHP on Apache?