Tony Bibbs has posted a mini-case study about how, at his work, they cut their use of the Zend_Log component of the Zend Framework in half:

As part of the framework we use at work, we borrow what we feel are the best components out there and logging is a key part of that. Logging should be simple to setup, easy to use and should minimize work on the developer. After all, you are going to do a lot of logging, right?

He shows how, with a few changes to how they log (creation of a custom logger), it reduces the number of calls to load a Zend_Registry object each time something needs to be recorded. His code is included in the post along with examples of it in action.

Posted to his blog, Dave Marshall has a tip that uses declare and a trick or two to check out the memory usage of your scripts.

As far as I know, there isn't any memory footprint profiling in Xdebug, I think there was at some point but they removed it because it was a little flaky. I like to monitor the memory usage within my scripts, and I've found this simple snippet can help.

The script defines a log_memory function that pushes the memory and time information into a session value. The register_tick_function method is used to add log_memory to the handler and its called over and over from inside his for loop.

In a new post on the SitePoint PHP blog today, Harry Fuecks has created a "wide finder" based on a project put together by Tim Bray.

Tim set a simple, but very much real-world challenge; write an app that determines the top 10 most popular blogs from his Apache access log. It should be fast and readable, with a subtext of illustrating how "language X" copes in terms of parallel processing and utilizing "wider" (many processor) systems.

Since PHP natively doesn't support multi-threading (well), Harry opted to go with an approach using curl_multi_exec instead. There's two pieces to the puzzle - the mapper to grab the information and extract the data and the reducer that makes the calls to grab the information from the log files.

In a new post, Matthew Turland looks at one thing that he feels is missing from a lot of the PHP functionality currently available in the community today - log analysis features.

Log analysis is a fairly common task in the field of web development, most often analysis of web server traffic logs or what Wikipedia refers to as web analytics. PHP has no officially supported extensions designed specifically for log analysis. There are no related extensions in PECL. The only remotely related extension in PEAR is PEAR_Log, which for generating logs rather than parsing or analyzing them. In short, there is no common solution here.

He looks at the options that developers do have - make their own solution or go with a third party option. He believes, though, that a PECL extension would be more the way to go, integrating with PHP more closely and allow for easier parsing and manipulating of the data in their own log files.

The Stubbles framework team has released the latest version of their framework today - Stubbles 0.1.0:

The Stubbles team is proud to announce the release of Stubbles 0.1.0. This release is a first alpha version and contains the basic features of Stubbles like the Extended Reflection API, XML handling with XMLStreamWriter and XMLSerializer, Logging, Event handling, support for filtering and validating user input and session handling. The release additionally contains parts of packages that we announced to be in the next milestone 0.2.0.

The Stubbles framework is one that seeks to "combine your favorite features from other programming languages and frameworks" and is flexible enough to allow for easy interfacing with other frameworks/components like PEAR or the Zend Framework.

David Coallier has a quick hit post today on his blog. In it, he shows how, with a little bit of SimpleXML magic, to parse the log files from your Subversion installation.

Yesterday I was struggling trying to get svn log to display the results for a certain user and this was very annoying.. then I jumped on #svn on freenode, and someone mentionned svn log --xml

This apparently made my life much much easier with this simple script I have pulled in a couple minutes.

He includes the script and a brief set of instructions on how to use it in your installation.

The results of the latest International PHP Poll are in for the question "Which is the best way to do PHP web testing?" Options included "Use SimpleTest Web tester", "Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields", and "Log HTTP requests in the application".

Coming out on top with 22.6 percent of the votes was the first item, though - "Use SimpleTest Web tester". Second was a close race with "All" and "None" only about 1 percent different ("None" being the higher).

Be sure to get your vote in for this week's poll question - "What Is the Top Mistake That PHP Coders Commit?" Options for this poll include "Not escaping entities and SQL input", "Syntax errors", and "Not using a Framework".

The PHP Thinktank Blog has posted two new IRC logs of talks give over in their IRC channel on the Freenode network.

Now that all the yearly holiday chaos is out of the way, we bring you new logs of two recent IRC discussions. As usual, they are available on the google group.

The two talks were:

• a look at Injection from BigE
• a discussion of web scraping with Elzar.

In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.

Here are some bugfixing rules and tips I've learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. I've moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.

Topics covered include:

• Assume nothing
• Turn Error Reporting to show all errors
• Read the error message
• Understand the bug
• "Scooby-Bug, where are you?"
• Get as much information as possible

Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.

The #php.thinktank channel on the Freenode IRC network has started their talk series with two new topics, the logs for which have been posted to the thinktank website.

The two topics so far have been:

• SLP by Davey Shafik
• php.NET (phalanger) by zaemis

You can also grab these over on the Google group for the thinktank.