Ben Ramsey's Blog: Lampooning Benchmarks
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In response to this previous post, Ben Ramsey has relayed some of this thoughts on the benchmarks that were done by Jonathan Street comparing functions and their aliases:   Mmy first reaction was something like: "Egads! These benchmarks are stupid and misleading! These functions are simply aliases of each other. There should be no discernible difference, and any buffoon should realize this fallacy!" This was before I clicked through from PHPDeveloper.org to read his post.   After reading his data and going on to the Better Benchmarks post that followed it, he found that most of the results of additional testing came out negligible and that there was almost no difference between the two.    Ben illustrates the proof of this with a few lines pasted from the "ext/standard/basic_functions.c" in PHP's source showing that the code is shared via a PHP_FALIAS function call.
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Hobbyists who push CPU heat and performance limits teach the chip-makers a thing or two, too.
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On the symfony blog today, there's a new article looking to dispel some misunderstanding that's come up surrounding the speed of symfony applications and what effect it can have in a real-world situation.    We regularly see framework benchmarks pop up somewhere on the net, comparing symfony to other frameworks, either in PHP or in other languages. The conclusion of some of them is "symfony takes more time than other frameworks to display a 'hello, world', which makes it unsuitable for real-world web applications".   If some benchmarks show that symfony is slower, jumping to the conclusion that symfony is not optimized is a big mistake. [...] If symfony is well implemented (or so we think), then its speed is just the sum of the individual speeds of all the features it includes. Or, to put it differently, Symfony's speed is the consequence of a series of choices that we made to decide whether a feature should or should not make it to the core.    They suggest that the speed of symfony applications does not come as a result of the main portion of the framework, but rather as a choice of the development team as to what parts they wanted to include in the core and what not to. They also point out that, while speed does matter somewhat, especially in larger applications, it shouldn't be highest on the list.
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.
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Rating the consumer-products giants on key financial metrics.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Rob Thompson has posted about some simple benchmarking he did comparing the speed of a series of "if" statements versus one "switch" with multiple cases.   I got curious about which is actually more efficient at matching a random integer with a set of conditionals. So, I setup a script to create a set of large scripts to test the speed of these different constructs. Using the 'time' command, I measured the speed at which the condition could match a random number.   His results found that the switch statement is generally more than 2 times as fast at matching a simple integer. His tests, however, didn't go through much more than this simple test. It'd be interesting to see what it would do with something more complex (like longer strings or handling the result of an evaluation inside the definition of the switch().
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On the "start up web 2.0" blog today, there's a set of benchmarks comparing two popular PHP frameworks - CakePHP and CodeIgniter - and how the fare in the standard "Hello World" sort of test.   After reading How fast is your framework I was rather intrigued to compare CakePHP and CodeIgniter. [...] Each framework is required to have the output "HelloWorld!" produced from a view and a controllers will obviously have to be created.   He ran the tests with the Apache benchmark tool (ab) and the simple code he provides with the results leaning towards CodeIgniter (by a good bit). Overall, it had a faster response time than CakePHP by about half.   Check out his results and grab the code and run it for yourself - see what kind of results you get and how they compare.
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As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:   I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.   The post includes Karol's solution - a method that involved using the Zend Framework as a backdrop. You can see the application in action on Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.
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Tycho:  I can really do without a lot of the corporate sniping that happens in this industry.  Plus, as a licensed demagogue, they're horning in on my territory when they say ridiculous things or make baseless verbal assaults!  I mean, I have mouths to feed.  Seriously, I have more than one mouth.
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Miguel de Icaza, in this weblog entry says, "Facts barely matter when they get in the way of a good smear. The comments over at Groklaw are interesting, in that they explore new levels of ignorance." This comment rings especially true of his weblog entry. For example, Miguel states... We have been working on OpenOffice.Org for longer than anyone else has. We were some of the earliest contributors to OpenOffice, and we are the largest external contributor to actual code to OpenOffice than anyone else. Say what?  Who created OpenOffice? Who bought it?  Who opened it?  Anyone ever hear of Star Division gmbh or Sun?  Since when did Novell become the earliest contributor to OpenOffice.org?  The earliest and largest external contributor, maybe.  I'd like to see some hard facts to back up an assertion like that (not that facts matter, as Miguel admitted), but his hyperbolic boasting of Novell's contribution is obviously overblown.
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Tycho:  I uploaded the comic early, as many of you noticed.  I entered the wrong number in the update field.  You may also have noticed that the spelling in these posts has really gone to hell.  So, that's numbers and letters.  I hope to one day discover a set of pictograms with which I can manage some baseline fucking proficiency.
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Most, if not all, of you have read or been in heated debates over why or why not higher clocked microprocessors are better than their &quot;comparable&quot; competition.
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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Microsoft flexes its parody muscles with another in-house lampoon. In Gear Factor.
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A new list of the top machines is  about to be released and SGI, IBM and others are jostling for bragging rights.
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Benchmark just invested in a support vendor.  Another one.  Is there a lesson in this?