In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.

I could not agree more.

At the 3rd European Workshop on Aspects in Software last week, I was confronted with questions that could have easily been answered by refering to a paper like this. If a paper such as this existed.

In "Things That Have No Name", …

In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.

I could not agree more.

At the 3rd European Workshop on Aspects in Software last week, I was confronted with questions that could have easily been answered by refering to a paper like this. If a paper such as this existed.

In "Things That Have No Name", …

In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.

I could not agree more.

At the 3rd European Workshop on Aspects in Software last week, I was confronted with questions that could have easily been answered by refering to a paper like this. If a paper such as this existed.

In "Things That Have No Name", …

Ilan Rabinovitch let me know that the SCALE team is getting started on version 5x of the SoCal Linux Expo.

In past years, SCALE has been a great community event - the ratio of promoters to real Linux enthusiasts is low and the attendees are friendly. Also, like most other Linux conferences, attendees have a strong interest in many other FLOSS community issues and technologies, like BSD, Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Free Software licensing and so on. Hopefully I can attend this year (and can wear both my eZ hat and my Mozilla hat for the event).

The event will happen from February 10-11 and will be held at the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel.

Get more details at: …

Update: As some people have pointed out, if this is on all the time in a production environment, it could be bad. We only enable it when debugging. But, in the interest of keeping the PHP world safe, I have edited the code.

Preface: I would not use this in a production environment on a full time basis.  When we do use it, we turn it on, gather some logs and turn it off.  Also, it has been pointed out to me that this will cause MySQL to not use the query cache in versions previous to 5.0.  That is another reason to not use this in a production environment full time.

So, on dealnews.com we often end up with a lot of queries that look kind of the same. It usually because we have a complex query that simply selects article ids from one or two tables and then a second query to select the data from the article table using those ids. If you have used MySQL …

So, a while back, I did some tests with the mysql, mysqli and PDO extensions. In those tests, I found PDO to be much slower for selects than mysql and mysqli. Half as slow in fact. Santos mentioned these tests in a post about SDO. Wez has pointed out that the mysql API does not use the query cache when using prepared statements. Apparently, under the covers, PDO uses prepared statements for all queries. At least that is what I am taking from this. My tests showed the same speed whether I used the PDO prepared syntax or not.

So, I decided to try Wez’s trick of emulating prepared statements to see how PDO did. The results were interesting. Not sure if these are the “fair comparisons” that Wez wants to see, but I …

I was just skimming over Santos' Post about SDO, and was saddened to see more anecdotes and less facts.

Here are two points that you should take note of:

• PDO is an "ultra fast direct layer to the database".

• The benchmarks I think you're referring to do not include the magic turbo switch I talk about here, that highlights performance problems when using prepared statements, which are on by default.

I'd love to see someone run some fair comparisons and publish the numbers.

Just came across a good article by Jay Pipes talking about lazy loading and caching of content. A nice read with some good code examples that I thought I should share with my fellow readers.

Read Jays blog entry

In Semi-Dynamic Data, Sheeri writes about Semi-Dynamic Data and content pregeneration. In her article, she suggests that for rarely changing data it is often adviseable to precompute the result pages and store them as static content. Sheeri is right: Nothing beats static content, not for speed and neither for reliability. But pregenerated pages can be a waste of system ressources when the number of possible pages is very large, or if most of the pregenerated pages are never hit.

An intermediate scenario may be a statification system and some clever caching logic.

Statification is the process of putting your content generation code into a 404 page handler and have that handler generate requested content. The idea is that on a …

Vim 7.0 introduces tabs to Vim. I wasn’t aware of this until BigE pointed it out to me, and to this tip; that lets you move around the tabs with firefox style short-cuts for tab navigation. That’s a great tip, but what about us OS X users who prefer using the “apple/command” key? I decided to use Safari style tab navigation for vim, as some of the would have caused problems with default keybindings. You can see the details here.. For people wondering how to get Vim 7.0 for their Macs, MacVim.org is your best bet.

Tags: php, vim, mysql, …