In a recent blog post Gaylord Aulke illustrated a method for dumping the (key) content from a memcached cache in a friendly, formatted way.

When i did some optimization of a cluster based webapp lately, I was wondering how Memcache was speading my cache entries over the cluster. So i did some research for monitoring tools. [...] Inspired by [memcache.php], i wrote a small script that fetches all data from a memcache cluster, gets all keys out of it and then sorts and displays them in a list. Yes it it ugly and yes: the memcacheD is not answering other requests while doing a cachedump.

He includes the 22 line script in the post to spit back the data in a simple array. From there it can be styled whoever you'd like.

A new note on the Internet Super Hero blog talks about a new improvement to the mysqlnd driver support a memory dump option for mysqli_debug.

Andrey has implemented a little mysqlnd only addition to mysqli_debug(): 'm' - dump memory information. It works like the other options described in PHP: Debugging ext/mysqli and mysqlnd with the only difference that it is only available with mysqlnd.

A comparison of the "before option 'm'" and "after option 'm'" is also included.

Both this post on the Zend Developer Zone and tis post on the International PHP Magazine's website point to a new article over on the IBM developerWorks website by Jack Herrington, Batch processing with PHP.

What do you do when you have a feature in your Web application that takes longer than a second or two to finish? You need some type of offline processing solution. Check out several methods for offline servicing of long-running jobs in your PHP application.

He talks about cron and its role in offline processing (including a basic primer on its format) before getting into the example itself. He looks at three examples:

• building an email queue
• building a generic queue system
• dumping out the database

Each example comes complete with code and descriptions to help you work them up on you very own system.