Johannes Schluter has a new post to his blog looking at the progress that the upload progress meter extension has been making and how a version of it, put together by Arnaud Le Blanc has been introduced to the trunk line of PHP's code.

For implementing this we have one architectural problem: PHP implements, for very good reasons, a shared nothing architecture. So one request from connection has no insight into another request/connection - but this is needed for the upload progress. [...] The obvious solution, of course, would be to use PHP's session handling system for this. [...] Now there were some technical issues why this wasn't done at first ... but then Arnaud Le Blanc sat down and created a proper implementation of an upload progress storage handler which has been commit to PHP trunk. Long story short: In the next version of PHP (5.4?) you will, most likely, have an Upload Progress mechanism built-in.

If you want all of the details on it, you can check out the RFC on it. Johannes shows a sample of the settings and code that, once the next release of PHP comes out, you can use to enable the extension and be able to poll the session for the progress details.