Everyone has heard of being slashdotted or maybe dugg. But have you ever been Yahoo!ed?

Phones started beeping, mayhem ensued. The first thing we looked at was the database. Is some MyISAM table locked? Is there a hung log processor running? The database was busy, but it looked odd. The web servers were going nuts.

As we soon discoverd, we (dealnews.com) were mentioned in an article on Yahoo!. At 5Pm Eastern, that article made it to be the featured article on the Yahoo! front page. It was there for an hour. We went from our already high Christmas traffic of about 80 req/s for pages and 200 req/s for images to a 130 req/s for pages and 500 req/s for images. We survived with a little tinkering. We have been working on a …

I got notified yesterday that my proposal for a talk at php|tek. I'll be presenting a talk entitled "Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance", which will be a fun-filled look at all those things we, as application and database developers, do to shoot ourselves in the foot when it comes to MySQL database performance. Lots of SQL coding techniques, and, as I say in the abstract, you're guaranteed to leave the taslk with at least one gem you can use to point the finger at a colleague! Good times!

A great post by Pete Lacey about SOAP and the problems one WILL encounter when trying to use it and understand it. Please someone make it go away!

Hello, I’d like to announce my new website that I’m building right now. FindInArticles.com. This site is about articles, it crawls all known article directories, article publishing sites and gethers articles from them. It has a really extensive categorical index. currently I have about 1000 articles but the number is growing daily. I used Php / Mysql / Apache [...]

I'm looking for someone who wants to hone their existing 3+ years of C hacking and debugging skills on some of the fastest, most highly stressed core infrastructure applications ever created.

The full job description is available on the OmniTI Careers page.

A successful applicant for the position will join the ranks of my Dark Apprentices and will have the opportunity to learn and develop skills such as:

• Performant, scalable thinking. Writing and troubleshooting code that runs in high stress environments.
• Sith debugging. Mastering the inner mysteries to deduce ways to effectively reproduce and resolve otherwise impossible problems.
• All the fun and happy details of the various email specs.

• Dry wit. You'll have the option of picking up some of my British humour.

…

So, we (dealnews.com) rolled out a new site this month, metaprice.com.  Its young and lacking features of many of the other price comparison sites, but is has great potential.  Our hope is to bring together the best features of all the other players in the market in one great application.
Part of this project required using web services with several different data suppliers.  Most support simple REST and SOAP, but some only offer SOAP.  So, given that I bit the bullet and enabled the SOAP extension for PHP5.  Wow!  I was happily surprised.  The last SOAP code I had looked at was the old PEAR code.  It was not that attractive to me.  It required a lot of work IMO to talk SOAP.

Now, with just 3 lines of code, I can get back a nice object that has all the data I need.  Kudos to Brad …

A few weeks ago, I was holding a PHP training for a customer who's using the Oracle database on a regular basis. My boss and I agreed on teaching the Oracle database connection with PDO (instead of the MySQL database connection we usually teach in trainings).

Continue reading "Oracle with PHP and PDO"

At the SDN Day on TechEd 06 Amsterdam I had the pleasure to make a short video with André Labahn from SAP. He's a member of the SDN/SAP team that tries to leverage the usage of scripting languages (PHP, Ruby) together with SAP software, mainly R/3 and other components. As you might know, SAP has some stakeholding into OpenSource, some time ago with their release of SAPDB as "MaxDB" which is now maintained by MySQL. Here's what André has to say about PHP & SAP:

The video is also available on sevenload.de.

Even when it is being repeated once more it is not true: Stripping binaries using the ‘strip’ utility can also significantly reduce the memory footprint of the application claims John Coggeshall.

While it is true that a file is smaller on disk after a strip, a quick run of "size" on a binary will show you that the actual binary part of the file is unchanged. Let's have a quick look at /proc/pid/maps to understand what happens.

Continue reading "Notes on VM"

I was really wondered today when I came across really interesting initiative of some women in #phpc IRC channel. They are trying to create some place where PHP women will be able to communicate and feel included in the world of PHP. Ligaya Turmelle (DevZone Roving Reporter) is one of the leaders spearheading the formation of phpwomen.org. She posted an update on their progress her blog recently. She talks about their new website, www.phpwomen.org, their mailing list which can be joined here and their irc channel on freenode.net, #phpwomen. She said:

It is women encouraging women to be active in the greater PHP World. We may be a small group but we have a big impact and are proud of who and what we are. We don’t wish to be exclusive and stand …