On DZone.com John Esposito reminds you about another technology Facebook has introduced to the world of PHP (besides HipHop) - XHProf, a PHP profiler.

Facebook did more for PHP: they also created XHProf, a PHP profiler with a (supposedly) easy-to-use HTML interface, designed to pinpoint exactly where your bottlenecks are appearing, so that you can optimize at every stage in the pipeline. [...] If you haven't tried XHProf, you might want to look into it. Installation apparently requires a little nudging, but Nick Lewis just posted a full, practical guide to benchmarking and performance tuning your PHP and MySQL, using XHProf (as well as other techniques) -- a very nice overview of many common bottlenecks and how to open them up.

There's also a link to some Drupal 6 benchmarks that shows how it has helped that project (including both small and large improvements).

On VentureBeat today there's a post (the first of two parts) looking at Facebook's involvement in Open Source software, including their work on HipHop and XHP for PHP (an interview with David Recordon and Amir Michael).

The social media company has, without question, taken the time to work on those projects. The hackers at Facebook have done perhaps more than any other single entity to advance and optimize PHP, the programming language on which the network is primarily built.

They talk about some of the projects, both PHP-related and not, that the developers of Facebook have either created or contributed to. There's mentions of Facebook's "hacker culture" and a mention of their workflow and how they decided on going forward with something like HipHop.

Artur Graniszewski has written up a comparison of the performance of a standard Durpal 7 installation using HipHop versus APC to handle the optimization of the application.

There have been many suggestions on improving Drupal performance, some of them recommend the use of APC module, data caching, or even compilation of the entire system through HipHop for PHP. While the first two solutions have been successfully implemented, no one was able to perform the build process. After many battles with the the compiler and the Drupal code, I present you results of the first successful translation of Drupal 7 to C++ language

He introduces the methods he used and the statistics of the platform (hardware) he tested with. He also includes the software used and compile commands used to create the compiled Drupal version. Included in the post are graphs showing CPU usage comparing the two types of testing (HipHop and APC) versus a normal PHP-based installation. It also briefly touches on concurrency levels and the different optimizations that could be made with the gcc compiler.

On the WebTutor.pl site they've posted the second part of their series looking at the benchmark results from their tests running HipHop. You can find their first post with some of the introductory setup and information here.

In previous article I measured the performance of HipHop for PHP by performing some tests downloaded from the shootout.alioth.debian.org website. Unfortunately the test list was incomplete. Only six tests were selected to avoid potential incompatibility issues with the HipHop compiler.

In this new post he provides the results for two more tests: regex-dna and k-nucleotide. He outlines the testing platform and shares the results of testing some pretty basic scripts. His results were interesting and found that some operations the HipHop compiler actually slowed down.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos looking back at 2010 an the life of PHP - yet another great year.

2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers. This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

Among the important happenings of this past year he mentions the issues surrounding PHP6, HipHop and PHP running on the Andriod platform. He speculates on a few things that we can expect from PHP in the upcoming year(s) like the release of PHP 5.4. Also included are some updates that were made to the PHPClasses.org site itself.

On the Facebook Engineering blog there's a new post summarizing the last six months since they released the HipHop tool for PHP along with some of the stats from the time.

Since February, the team has made HipHop another 1.8 times faster and all of that code is open source. We've also seen improvements to PHP itself with the additions to PHP's trunk in April being about 10% faster than 5.3.

They talk about projects they've worked with (including Drupal and WordPress), community contributions, a first use of it in production at ocProducts and the work that's been done for FreeBSD.

In a new blog entry today Sebastian Bergmann quickly shows a method of performing some code analysis on code transformed by HipHop for PHP.

HipHop for PHP, the source code transformer that turns PHP code into C++ code that can then be compiled with g++, can also be used for static code analysis to find problems in PHP source code.

He includes a script that creates an XML document that both Checkstyle and PHP_CodeSniffer can use to check for a valid format on his sample "CodeErrors.js" file. He includes the script to create this XML file.

On the php|architect site today there's a wrap-up from Keith Casey about the latest DC PHP User Group meeting where Scott MacVicar from Facebook presented on HipHop.

[Scott's] title is "Open Source Developer Advocate" which puts him in the odd position of making good things happen within Facebook, representing them to the community, and convincing the community to get involved. Towards that goal, this presentation was the last stop of a short tour to present HipHop to PHP groups.

He mentions the stats Scott shared - the size of Facebook's image hosting, the time spent on the site by the average user - and, of course, details on how HipHop helps them with his crushing load of users. He was also asked a question on the lips of many a developer out there - why would Facebook release HipHop for public consumption? You'll have to read the post to find out.

Doru Moisa has written up a new post with some benchmarks comparing static calls versus singleton calls for a few different situations.

n the past several months I've been working with a rather large application built with symfony. I noticed that symfony makes heavy use of the Singleton pattern (other frameworks, like Zend do that too); everywhere in the code [...] Notice the amount of code needed by the Singleton pattern. Except the [shown] method, all the code in the class makes sure you have only one instance at any time during the execution.

He shows how to replace the standard singleton logic with something more specific and decides to test the two methods, seeing which of them can handle the most requests per second. His sample code is included for both the scripts called and the test script run. In all instances, the static call won out over the singleton instance easily. Even when tested with the Facebook compiler, the results were still the same.

Michael Wales has taken a look at what effect HipHop could have on your CodeIgniter application (or lack there of).

So, what does this mean for the CodeIgniter community? In short, absolutely nothing. Most CodeIgniter developers are building applications that will run on shared hosts, virtual private servers or a cloud-based virtualization system. Of that very large group of our community, an extremely small number have the capability to compile the HipHop binaries or alter their configuration in order to serve HipHop pages.

He points out that, for most developers and applications, time is better spent optimizing the actual application - things like reducing the I/O needs, caching, etc. HipHop, unless you have a very high demand and load on the application, won't give much of a gain. He gives the example of Facebook's load and how even it would only relatively recently would benefit from the tool.