Correcting himself from some previous comments concerning PHP 5 versus PHP 4 usage among developers, Marco Tabini has posted something new to his blog with some updated stats.
In the past, I have not been shy about sharing my opinion that the impending death of PHP 4 would have wreaked all sorts of havoc over the PHP world. I am glad to say that I've been wrong - dead wrong, in fact - and that I have never been as happy to be so far off the mark before.
According to a readers survey that the php|architect magazine ran (about a year ago even) PHP 5 is stronger than ever, taking up well over sixty percent of the usage with only a small part still hanging with PHP 4. Check out his graph for the full rankings.
In a recent post to his blog Patrick Allaerttakes a look at benchmarking what Zend Platform has to offer against its open source brothers, Xdebug and APC.
The benchmark has been realized on an Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz with 2Gb of RAM running Gentoo with a 2.6.25-r7 linux kernel.
ab, the Apache Benchmark tool, has been used for the benchmark with 3000 requests and three concurrency modes: -c1, -c5 and -c50 which represents respectively 1, 5 and 50 simultaneous users.
The application tested is eZ Publish 4.0.1 with default configuration using the "plain_site" example.
He tested with a number of different PHP installations including a base install of PHP 5.2.6, one including APC, another with APC+Xdebug and others with the Zend Platform. The resulting stats are included as well as a graph showing their relationships to each other. The installs using the bytecode caching came out on top (obviously) with the APC installations being much faster than the accelerated Zend Platform.
In this new post to his Oracle blog, Chris Jones shows how to set up DBMS_OUTPUT to work with the OCI8 extension available for PHP.
Immediately after OOW, Alison and I have got straight into updating the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We've had our heads right down. [...] When reviewing the DBMS_OUTPUT section I tried using a PIPELINED PL/SQL function and found a significant speed improvement over the basic method.
He shows a few different methods for getting it working and includes both the code, SQL to create the functions and a bit of stats at the end showing which method is the fastest (the pipelined version wins out by quite a bit every time).
According to some statistics gathered by the Gartner Research group, PHP is trending more towards being found in the enterprise:
A recent Gartner Research study found that 10 percent of the PHP community are corporate IT developers, and predicted that during the next five years, that number will grow to 40 percent. That's good news for PHP developers looking for corporate gigs--and very good news for PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, which cited the Gartner finding at the Zend/PHP Conference last week as evidence of widespread, more strategic adoption of PHP in enterprises.
Much of this has to do with Zend's products and their placement in more enterprise settings as well as the collaborations they've created with several key big-name players like Adobe, IBM and Dojo (as a part of the Zend Framework). There's also a mention of some of Microsoft's initiatives in the PHP community including work on the FastCGI component and a SQL Server driver for PHP.
In a recent post to his blog Christoph Dorn shows off a cool little trick to getting your Mac to respond to your (vocal) request for website stats from FeedBurner.
You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.
His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.
Paul Jones has taken a look at some performance statistics that Rasmus Lerdorf shared in a recent presentation from some of his tests.
It was with some interest, then, that I viewed Rasmus Lerdorf's slides on the subject of performance benchmarking. I'm beginning to think there's something unexpected or unexamined in his testing methodology.
Paul compares some of his statistics (gathered from his testing) to those of Rasmus and finds a few places where things don't quite match up - specifically in the default overhead that seems to be a part of Rasmus' stats. Paul goes on to look at EC2 as a cause to the problems but ends up without much of a confirmed answer.
In a recent blog postGaylord 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.
Harun Yaylimentions some updates to his memcache.php project (providing statistics on the optimization your site is gaining from using the memcached extension).
Your good comments from all over the world about memcache.php is amazing. Thank you all! I've recently received a contribution from Michael Gauthier. I took the liberty to tweak a bit and now memcache.php can flush individual server (no flush all servers yet).
The latest version of the file can be downloaded here and some sample output can be seen here.
