The idea of parallel processing is when you take an atomic transaction or operation called a 'process' and run a couple of those at the same time. [...] In this example I had a PHP CLI script. The purpose of this script was to process remote documents and save it local. It fetched the document from a remote location, processed it and saved the result local - let's call this the transaction. Transactions were done sequentially. It took about 1 second for a transaction to complete and the script had to do roughly 3500 transactions.

Obviously, this script/testing method was not very effective, so he went searching for an alternative. The best option came in the shape of forking processes - spawning off a separate script (via PHP's forking functionality) to do the work on one or multiple entries. It uses the pcntl_fork and pcntl_waitpid functions to spawn and manage these children. Once they're all finished - working in parallel - they return back to the main script to wait for the slower ones to catch up.

From the article:

Jukka on the S60 Blogs is reporting that PHP and mySQL are going to be available for S60 devices in early 2008. [...] I (Johan Wikman) can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

The PAMP stack stands for "Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP" and will be included in the S60 smartphones and makes it possible to install most PHP applications (that use MySQL) right off the shelf. Developers of several GTD-type applications are reported to already be in testing on the new platform.

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

Greg mentions some other issues that were fixed and a refactoring of some of the stream operations to cut the speed in half.

According to this blog entry (sorry, German), you may improve Zend Studio's editor performance by switching off the option "Use OS Look and Feel" (at Tools > Preferences, tab "Desktop", option "Use OS Look and Feel").

According to the comments on the post, this seems to work well.

Lucene supports boosting or weighting terms. For example, if I search for members of a web site, and I type in Dash, I want people with the name Dash to take precedence over somebody who has a hobby of running the 50-yard Dash.

He shows how to, with the help of a few simple lines of PHP code added to your application, you can easily boost terms based on field by whatever multiplier you choose.

Two weeks ago I plugged APC onto my main customers site, and I'm really satisfied by it now. I already tried it some time ago, but back then it had some problems with PEARs Quickforms and similiar heavy OO code, but those problems are fixed for about 90% now, some 8% can be easily fixed by reordering require statements and the like and finally the remaining ~2% are going to be fixed by Rasmus in the foreseeable future.

The package also contains a useful status script, just copy the shipped apc.php to your document root. You'll see how the usage of the SHM segment grows by time, and after some time you'll also see what settings to use for apc.num_files_hint and apc.shm_size when the whole site is cached.

The APC package is "the Alternative PHP Cache. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code."]]> Fri, 18 Nov 2005 05:34:10 -0600