Linde002::PHP

The “High performance PHP & MySQL scaling techniques” was given by Eli White and he showed a couple of need tricks to help you scale your website.

The simplest solution is adding a loadbalancer and a couple of PHP server for the frontend and a MySQL master with a couple of slaves for the backend. Remember, hardware is cheap! Another easy solution is installing APC (alternative PHP cache) because by default, PHP recompiles every request and by caching the compiled code you can save up to 50% in time. Interestingly enough APC will ship by default in future versions of PHP. The drawback is that in rare cases, APC can get confused by nested dynamical includes but as Eli said, if you do that you need to rewrite your code anyways.

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This talk was given by Elizabeth Smith (aurorarose) at the unConference. It was mainly a PHP-GTK2 tutorial that built a GTK twitter app but an interesting point she made were that, unlike what most people say, the desktop won’t fade out into a void. People will always need desktop applications because a: not everybody has access to the internet all the time, b: some apps are too bandwith consuming and c: you don’t want to send sensitive data over the web if you don’t have to.

Another cool thing was that she’d be looking into adding the GTK threading libs to PHP-GTK so we might get threading in future versions, no more Gtk::main_iteration_do(true);  Well less anyway.

Terry Chay’s talk at the unConference was about ways to make frameworks suck less, this was an interesting topic because alot of Zendcon’s sessions are centered around their opensource flagship Zend Framework. The key point he made was that using a framework has consequences. If you decide to use a framework you’re stuck with all the decisions the creators of that framework made.

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