Sebastian Bergmann's Blog: Benchmark of PHP Branches 3.0 through 5.3-CVS
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.   As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.   He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.   He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it:
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Marco Tabini (of php|architect) has posted some thoughts to his blog about the PHP4 end-of-life announcement and its relations to the current push to go PHP5 - mainly how it relates to hosting providers.   I'm sure that a large number are owners of small hosting firms - which, by far, provide the vast majority of PHP-powered websites that Netcraft carefully tracks for us - that sell cheap shared hosting. [...] If you provide shared-hosting plans, it's likely that your servers are still running PHP 4. Upgrading to PHP 5 is a logistical nightmare for two reasons: first, you don't necessarily know that you'll be able to properly set up and secure your systems; second, you don't know that your customers' applications will keep on running.   Both reasons can cause very different kinds of hassles for the hoster, especially when it comes to their customers. As Marco puts it "hell hath no fury like a customer scorned". When things are going smoothly, everything's good, but the second that you try to explain that the update is what's good for them, all they see are things breaking and freak out.   He suggests only one real solution - make the move and tell the customers now that things are changing. Help them all you can (with information about updated software and resources) but ultimately it's up to them to make the change.
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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The results of the latest International PHP Magazine are in and posted today on their site. The question this time was asking developers and visitors alike what they think sucks about PHP.   Choices included "No lexical scoping", "PEAR", and "Worst Configuration System" but one climbed to the top far above the others - "No namespacing". Trailing that at a distant second were two, getting the same number of votes - "No lexical scoping" and "Can't afford a vowel" (hmm, interesting).    Up for this week is a new poll that asks those out there that have used the Symfony framework to cast their votes about what they think is the best feature the project has included. Check it out and cast your vote today...
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:onPHP5.com: Clickable, Obfuscated Email AddressesJacob Santos' Blog: PHP BlackjackThe Bakery: RESTful Web Services With CakePHPDeveloper.com: Developing a Ajax-driven Shopping Cart with PHP and PrototypeGreg Beaver's Blog: Mac OS X ships with security hole-laden PEAR - how to upgrade immediatelyNexen.net: English Articles and a Single Distribution ResourceJob Posting: Red Ventures Seeks Several LAMP Developers (Charlotte, NC)The Bakery: Checking for duplicate records (unique record)DevShed: The Basics of Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5NewsForge.com: A DIY calendar control in PHPDevGuide.net: Dynamic Bitmap Graphics with PHP and GDRichard Heyes' Blog: Browser DetectionInternational PHP Magazine: Poll Question: Which is the Most Important Feature of PHP 5?Builder.au: Dynamic XML document construction with the PHP DOMCommunity News: PEAR Version 1.5.0 Released
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHPClasses.org: A PHP killer feature - Streams abstractionRob Thompson's Blog: Switch vs. IfPHPEverywhere: Octopussy numbers in PHPJob Posting: MODE Visual Seeks PHP Developer (Charlotte, NC)ProDevTips.com: Why PHP as a templating language sucksMatthew Turland's Blog: The Yin and Yang of TypingStubbles Blog: Stubbles 0.5.0 releasedChristopher Jones' Blog: Updated connection pooling in PHP's OCI8 extensionBen Ramsey's Blog: Congrats Costa Rica PHP!Carsten Lucke's Blog: Configuration issues with Xdebug on Debian Etch
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The latest release of PHP in the PHP 5.2.x series has been posted for download to the main PHP website today - version 5.2.3.   The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.   Updates in this new version include many security fixes and enhancements - check out the Changelog for complete information.   Check out other comments on the release from Ilia Alshanetsky and Stefan Esser.
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Michael Kimsal has posted some more thoughts on what he calls the "sad state of PHP development" pointing out some of the practices of the PHP group surrounding the development of the language.   Every few months there's a release, whether large or small, which introduces new features and bug fixes. However, with every release also comes fears of tiny, sometimes undocumented, changes that break existing code, and often for no solid reason other than someone with commit access decided they liked the 'new' way better than the old way.   He points out a specific example, get_object_vars and how its return values were changed in an earlier release as well as the update to glob made recently to change its return types.    In his opinion:   No changes should be made to the PHP core without an issue being opened, either in the 'bug' tracker or some other issues tracker.   Be sure to check out the comments for other great opinions on the topic.
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The International PHP Magazine has posted the results from their latest poll of the week. This time they asked the slightly odd question of opinions on the PHP Throwdown event - "The Rules of PHP Throwdown Include".   Seems like the question might have confused some others because the votes were notably lower than in some previous weeks. There was a tie for first place, though - both coming in with 6.8% of the votes were the "You can use PHP4 or PHP 5, MySQL or SQLite, Ajax, HTML, XHTML, and Javascript but no Flash" and "All" options. Dead last with no votes was the "All applications must be licensed with a CC compatible license" option.   They've also posted a new poll for this week asking which of the options you think still ring true when it comes to PHP:  PHP administrators like to compile PHP in Summer Register global is not dead memory_limit is not used PHP applications handle 100 Mb files
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted both the Zend Weekly Summaries issues #323 and #324.   In #323, there's talk of OpenSSL integration, a CVS server change, and several PHP security discussions (a suggested read).   Issue #324 talks about runtime JIT proposals, debugging overloaded objects, more on PHP security, the release of PHP 5.2.1 RC3, and more "fine grained" control over allow_url_*   Be sure to keep up with the latest mailing list and community happenings through these great updates from Steph Fox.
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This  is very interesting:  "As large MediaWiki deployments may gain performance using Memcached, at some level cost of RAM to store all objects becomes too high. In order to balance resource usage and take more use of Apache server disks, Tugela, the distributed cached on-disk hash database, has arrived."  So Tugela  is like memcached but backed by a disk-based btree.  Since most memcached installs are usually backed by MySQL we would just be duplicating some of the work that MySQL already does. Of course this is probably being a bit unfair.  There wouldn't be any locking in this situation.  I'd like to see benchmarks though.  I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to beat an InnoDB install.   ...
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Richard Thomas has gone back to a topic he talked about previously, benchmarking the Zend Framework, in a new post to his blog today.   So Zend Framework is now at 1.0.1, what did benchmarking find? The goal is to just output Hello World with the most basic set of files possible for each case.   His tests included several different methods:   Plain HTML Pure PHP Two different Zend Framework versions (1.0.1, 0.2.0) Solar his own "Cyberlot Framework"   For each stats are included for things like total time taken, complete requests, time per request and transfer rate.
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On the O'Reilly OnLamp.com blog, chromatic voices some concerns about the latest PHP statistics being released.   It's been three months since PHP Versions in the Wild. What does Nexen report about PHP version adoption statistics for November? [...] Nexen's PHP Adoption Stats for November 2006 show that PHP 4.4 has surpassed PHP 4.3. PHP 5 is in the double-digits, but it's still a fraction of PHP 4's popularity, despite its climb.   He also comments that, for those working towards a PHP6 release, it "must be frustrating" to see PHP5 adoption having taken such a long time to really get a foothold.    Developers and users alike were comfortable in their PHP4 world and didn't want to branch out to this newfangled thing that is PHP5. They hear stories of how it breaks things and only causes trouble and don't want to make the move. But finally, some brave souls put their feet in the water, saw that there were no piranhas in sight and dove right in. Thankfully, more and more have followed them hearing the success and ease with which PHP5 has made things in their applications.   So, what's your excuse? Why haven't you made the switch? And will you follow those leader's example and dive right into PHP6 when it comes around?
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DevShed has a new article posted today covering some of the new features in PHP5.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).