Mohammad Emran Hasan has posted a quick example of using the pecl_http extension to make concurrent HTTP requests.

The pecl_http extension has a little gem that can be handy at times – HttpRequestPool. Using this, you can send concurrent HTTP requests and can gain efficiency in fetching non-related data at once. For example, from an external source if your application needs to retrieve an user’s profile, their order history and current balance, you can send parallel requests to the API and get everything together.

His code shows three example connections to a made up URL on three different endpoints. With the HttpRequestPool functionality, all three can be requested at once and tracked to extract the response body.

On CoderWall.com there's a post sharing some findings about how RockThePost.com scaled PHP to 30,000 concurrent users on Amazon EC2 instances.

RockThePost.com is a LAMP stack hosted on Ec2. We're preparing to be featured in an email which will be sent to ~1M investors... all at the same time. For our 2 person engineering department, that meant we had to do a quick sanity check to see just how many people we can support concurrently.

They have a list of five suggestions/opinions on what has helped them scale out to this level including using Varnish for caching, turning on APC (PHP opcode caching) and using a c1.xlarge EC2 instance. They used Google Analytics and Siege to run their load testing on the "exterior" of the site.

From Iain Dooley on WorkingSoftware.com.au today, there's a new tutorial covering the installation of PHP4 and PHP5 onto a FreeBSD server.

So, briefly here is my little recipe for getting PHP4 and PHP5 to run concurrently on FreeBSD using Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy.

He points out one method that's been posted to get this all working, but notes that there are a few issues he found with it. That's the point of this post - to rectify and solve those problems to have you on your way to a happily working PHP4/PHP5 installation.

His guide is broken up into the key steps:

• Compiling with mod_proxy from FreeBSD ports
• Installing another Apache instance
• PHP Installation
• Configuring and running Apache
• and a bug, Bug 37770, he came across where the proxy would just stop working

From Iain Dooley on WorkingSoftware.com.au today, there's a new tutorial covering the installation of PHP4 and PHP5 onto a FreeBSD server.

So, briefly here is my little recipe for getting PHP4 and PHP5 to run concurrently on FreeBSD using Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy.

He points out one method that's been posted to get this all working, but notes that there are a few issues he found with it. That's the point of this post - to rectify and solve those problems to have you on your way to a happily working PHP4/PHP5 installation.

His guide is broken up into the key steps:

• Compiling with mod_proxy from FreeBSD ports
• Installing another Apache instance
• PHP Installation
• Configuring and running Apache
• and a bug, Bug 37770, he came across where the proxy would just stop working

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today on the topic of installing both PHP4 and PHP5 at the same time (well, have them installed at the same time) on one Windows XP machine. The kicker is that it only uses one Apache 2 installation and runs on a single port. Interested?

One thing is sure, the fifth version of this great programming language is much better than all the previous ones, and sooner or later it will become ubiquitous. But what to do until then? Is it possible to have the 'best of both worlds'?

Is it possible to have the both versions of PHP installed on the same computer without conflicts, so one can maintain old PHP 4 projects, and develop new PHP 5 code? The answer is, yes.

The author (Slobodan Pavkov) steps you through his solution:

• how to prepare the machine for the installation and what you need to download
• how to get things installed and configured
• and a simple test to make sure things are in order

The key to the seperation is editing the hosts file on the machine and placing the files in different directories - one for PHP5 files and another for PHP4.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted today on the topic of installing both PHP4 and PHP5 at the same time (well, have them installed at the same time) on one Windows XP machine. The kicker is that it only uses one Apache 2 installation and runs on a single port. Interested?

One thing is sure, the fifth version of this great programming language is much better than all the previous ones, and sooner or later it will become ubiquitous. But what to do until then? Is it possible to have the 'best of both worlds'?

Is it possible to have the both versions of PHP installed on the same computer without conflicts, so one can maintain old PHP 4 projects, and develop new PHP 5 code? The answer is, yes.

The author (Slobodan Pavkov) steps you through his solution:

• how to prepare the machine for the installation and what you need to download
• how to get things installed and configured
• and a simple test to make sure things are in order

The key to the seperation is editing the hosts file on the machine and placing the files in different directories - one for PHP5 files and another for PHP4.