Yesterday an ex colleague tweeted something that captured my attention, so I started thinking to a Twitter-powered code golfing competition. Looking for other examples.

Tweets included in the list are snippets like:

• A dependency injection container
• A super simple web framework
• A microframework
• Bypassing array_intersect

There's some game rules included in the post so you can contribute your own to the the comments. Several have already been added including a base64 encoding variant and getting the extension of a file.

While profiling our application I came across a a rather strange memory usage by the ob_start() function. We do use ob_start() quite a bit to defer output of data, which is a common thing in many applications. What was unusual is that 16 calls to ob_start() up chewing through almost 700kb of memory, given that the data being buffered rarely exceeds 1-2kb, this was quite unusual.

Through a bit more testing he found that, if a buffer provided for content isn't enough, PHP automatically bumps it up by 10kb each time - a waste of resources if you only need a small subset of that. He includes a small patch he made to the PHP core API that allows for defining a custom buffer size and, if it's not enough, bumps up the buffer size by 1kb instead of 10kb.

If you are using phpcloud.com and are experiencing errors with git [...] and you are trying to push large files (not sure what is defined as "large") you may need to change some git settings.

He points out two settings - one for Windows and the other for Linux - that increase the buffer size to handle larger files that might be included in your repository.

They look at five different frameworks:

• Kohana
• Rapyd
• Epicode
• ELF PHP
• BaseApp

A few other frameworks are also mentioned in the comments like the micro-framework limonade and Madeam.

The application is simple. You enter a bunch of text and Wordle does the rest. The applet provides options to change color, font and layout. Just for fun I created a Wordle cloud to display php's built in functions. Two samples are shown below. The size of the font in the cloud is proportional to the number of functions starting with the particular name.

Among the largest on the list are words like "array", "get", "mysql" and "mcrypt". He used a call to the get_defined_functions() method and looped through the "internal" subarray to build his lists.

In the following podcast I go over the key factor when determining how to structure a PHP project. In a nutshell, it comes down to the size and complexity of the job. For the details, listen to me yap.

You can download the mp3 directly from his site. For more great PHP tutorials, check out his videos section.

Every now and then, I get a call from a client who is puzzled why their site is running slow. I would look at their page and see an innocuous image inserted into a paragraph. When I examine the image, though, I see that the client has artificially resized the image using HTML. One recent example showed on-screen as a 300px-wide image. When I examined it, it was actually 3000px wide (approx).

The script looks through some HTML markup and, based on the sizes in the image tags, resizes the images appropriately. An example and the source are provided.

Antony got the idea to implement a C-like array wrapper in SPL: SplFastArray. The main advantage of that class is performance, it's indeed faster than PHP arrays. How so? No free lunch: The speedup comes from the fact that non-numeric indexes are not allowed and that the array is of fixed size.

The code sample shows the setting of the size for the array (and changing it) with a var_dump of the output result. This method is always faster than normal arrays, it just varies how much from system to system (anywhere from ten to thirty percent).

The initial script in the first tutorial of this series lacked some important features, such as the implementation of an effective error handling module and the ability to check the MIME type and size of the file being uploaded. In this second installment of the series, I'm going to improve the logic of the script from the first tutorial to provide it with the capacity to retrieve useful information concerning the entire file uploading process.

They look back at the previous tutorial to remind you of some of the concepts and then move on to show you how to get information about the file (like the MIME type, name and size of the uploaded file). The last page is just the full source code for the cut and pasters out there.

I have found myself in a position where I am writing scripts that may need to upload fairly large files. My scripts were timing out, and I couldn't seem to figure out why. For the unitiated, there are some standard things that you usually do to both your php.ini and in your script in this situation [...] However, it turns out there are some other php.ini config variables that you may need to look at.

The "usual suspects" list includes changing the max_upload_size value and adjusting the script timeout. The other settings he mentions, though, are things like memory_limit, post_max_size and max_input_time to help increase the default times that PHP uses on most page executions.