Paul Jones has taken a look at some performance statistics that Rasmus Lerdorf shared in a recent presentation from some of his tests.

It was with some interest, then, that I viewed Rasmus Lerdorf's slides on the subject of performance benchmarking. I'm beginning to think there's something unexpected or unexamined in his testing methodology.

Paul compares some of his statistics (gathered from his testing) to those of Rasmus and finds a few places where things don't quite match up - specifically in the default overhead that seems to be a part of Rasmus' stats. Paul goes on to look at EC2 as a cause to the problems but ends up without much of a confirmed answer.

In a recent blog post Gaylord Aulke illustrated a method for dumping the (key) content from a memcached cache in a friendly, formatted way.

When i did some optimization of a cluster based webapp lately, I was wondering how Memcache was speading my cache entries over the cluster. So i did some research for monitoring tools. [...] Inspired by [memcache.php], i wrote a small script that fetches all data from a memcache cluster, gets all keys out of it and then sorts and displays them in a list. Yes it it ugly and yes: the memcacheD is not answering other requests while doing a cachedump.

He includes the 22 line script in the post to spit back the data in a simple array. From there it can be styled whoever you'd like.

Harun Yayli mentions some updates to his memcache.php project (providing statistics on the optimization your site is gaining from using the memcached extension).

Your good comments from all over the world about memcache.php is amazing. Thank you all! I've recently received a contribution from Michael Gauthier. I took the liberty to tweak a bit and now memcache.php can flush individual server (no flush all servers yet).

The latest version of the file can be downloaded here and some sample output can be seen here.

Damien Seguy has official published the PHP statistics for July 2008 to the Nexen.net website today. Here's a summary:

• PHP 5 reaches 40,63% of PHP market share
• PHP 5.2.6 usage is growing fast, about to take over PHP 5.2.5
• PHP 4.4.9 and 5.2.6 will threaten PHP 4.4.8's dominance in August 2008

You can find the evolution stats for this past month here and the full statistics here.

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.

The Avent Labs blog has done some basic benchmarking on some of the more popular PHP frameworks out there today. The post includes the tools they used and the full results.

In response to Wil's comment regarding the PHP framework performance comparisons I made in my previous post, I have decided to post the results I got. My decision not post them initially was due to the benchmarks not being done in complete isolation (a separate client and server machine) but the scores relative to each should still be accurate and that's what I am testing for.

He used a machine with a 1.8Ghz sempron chip (running Ubuntu) to run the tests through httperf. His method involved creating the same sort of "hello world" sort of controller to gauge the framework's performance and a baseline procedural version of the same as a guide. His full results are available as a tar file and as a zip archive.

Inspired by the nice web interface that the Alternative PHP Cache provides (apc), Harun Yayli decided to hack together his own version for the memcache caching software.

For a long time I was looking for a nice web interface like the apc.php (comes with the apc's source) that displays whole nine yards of stats. [...] Anyways, I decided to rip write my own. Totally based on the original apc.php (I even recycled some functions) and apart from completeness, here is a memcache.php that you can get stats and dump from multiple memcache servers.

Here's the output of his script and he's made the source for it available for download as well.

Damien Seguy has released the latest PHP statistics for last month - April 2008. Among the highlights are things like:

• PHP 5.2.5 is now the most popular PHP version, ahead of 4.4.8
• PHP 5 reaches 36.60% of PHP market share
• Still a lot of migrations toward 5.2.5 and 4.4.8

You can check out the details on these and other statistics (like PHP usage by country and version) the complete monthly stats and the evolution stats. Oh, and don't forget - Damien and crew are the ones supplying the latest edition of the elePHPants to the PHP community!

PHPDeveloper.org has come a long way over the past eight years (we'll turn eight in August!) and this post marks our ten thousandth post in our quest to bring you the best news and community happenings for all things PHP. I never would have figured that this site would turn into what it was, especially back when I was only making one post a day that summarized everything back in college.

I'd like to thank all of those that have helped me along the way (you know who you are) to make this site even better and to help provide quality content. And, of course, to the readers out there - without you we wouldn't be what we are. A fun fact - PHPDeveloper.org is, as of right now, sitting at the #1 spot on Google's results for both "php news" and "php developer". Our traffic is split pretty well with around 42% coming from Google, about 32% from referring sites and 24% being direct requests to the site. That's not even counting our RSS feed - we get around 60,000 requests for that each day alone!

I thought I'd honor the occasion with some statistics to walk down memory lane and share live before 10k:

Total characters in all news posts:
11,450,469

Total comments:
68,661 (65,517 of those are spam)

Top Five Months by Posts:
08/2006 - 265
06/2006 - 252
10/2005 - 227
10/2006 - 224
05/2006 - 216

Top Five Posts by Views:
06.28.2006 - Tutorial: An Introduction to OOP in PHP (47018 views)
06.07.2005 - Community News: A Decade of PHP (30810 views)
03.05.2006 - Community News: The PHP Community Responds to the Framework (29882 views)
08.20.2006 - PHP-Tools Blog: New releases of patTemplate and patForms (29009 views)
09.06.2005 - Community News: Joomla! Project Announced (28841 views)

Thank you to all of our readers over the last eight years!

On his blog, Andreas Gohr has posted about various charting applications on the web (in his search for a way to show off the stats for DokuWiki) and looking specifically at the Google Charts.

Because such [popularity] data is much better to comprehend when accompanied by some nice graphs, I had a look at the Google Chart API today.

He also mentions three wrapper libraries that help your apps interface with the Charts API. Of course, he also includes some graphs of the popularity stats showing things like web server usage and PHP versions.