Since the Symfony framework project has such tight integration with both the Propel and Doctrine ORM layers, they thought they'd share some statistics on the usage of both as mapped through the stats from their Jobeet tutorial.

As for any Open-Source community, it's not easy to find metrics that tell you what people use and how they use it. You can measure the number of tickets for a specific feature, count the number of people asking for help on Propel or Doctrine. But for the Propel vs Doctrine question, we have two more reliable metrics.

As is shown in this graph of the total Jobeet traffic in 2009, Doctrine is winning by a long shot. That's not to say that you can't still use Propel is that's what you and your application are using, this is just showing the overall popularity of each of the ORMs.

New on the Internet Super Hero blog today Ulf Wendel has a huge post with a complete listing of all one hundred and twenty different kinds of statistics that the mysqlnd driver for PHP can gather during its connections:

This is about twice as much as it was when I blogged about the 59 tuning screws for mysqlnd. While the basics have not not changed and the API calls for accessing the data remained the same (see previous posting) the new figures have never been described before.

Each of the items on the list is described and some include some sample use cases. Here's just a few:

• packets_sent, packets_received
• bytes_received_eof_packets, packets_received_eof
• bytes_received_rset_field_meta_packet, packets_received_rset_field_metabytes_received_change_user_packet, packets_received_change_user
• result_set_queries
• slow_queries
• flushed_normal_sets, flushed_ps_sets
• rows_fetched_from_client_ps_cursor
• connect_success, connect_failure
• in_middle_of_command_close
• command_buffer_too_small

Hannes Magnusson has posted a few useless statistics about the PHP language including:

• Since PHP 3.0.18 (released October 2000) (no, php.net doesn't keep release records before that for some reason) 60 PHP releases have been made.
• There have only been 2 releases in 2009 so far
• The 89th, 121st, 122nd, 194th, 228th, 241st and the 349th day of the year have had 2 releases each
• The 18th week of the year is most likely to have an release, whole 8 releases have been made in that week!
• 26 PHP releases have been on Thursdays

He also includes a snippet of code that can be used to pull together some of these stats yourself (with only a few errors thrown).

In this new post to his blog Matt Curry shows off a CakePHP status dashboard that can be included in your CakePHP app to get some vital statistics on its current state.

You build a cool CakePHP app and now you have to maintain it. You go to Google to check your analytics; you SSH to your system to check log files; You log into your web admin to check affiliate clicks'¦ Wouldn't it be cool if you could check all this (and more) from one page? That's what this status plugin does.

You can see a screenshot here and grab the code from the project's github page. Right now you can use the Google Analytics, shell logging, system information and log file viewer panels.

There's a new tutorial from Noupe.com today that walks you through the process of making a customized statistics program by combining HTML, Javascript (some Ajax) and PHP. In this case, they're looking to track the visitors to a website.

When creating a website, one main goal is to attract visitors. Traffic generation is a necessity for monetary purposes, showing off your work, or just expressing your thoughts. There are many ways to create traffic for your website. Search engines, social bookmarking, and word of mouth are just a few examples. But how do you know whether this traffic is genuine? How do you know if your visitors are coming back for a second time?

The application they help you build (demo here) doesn't do any graphic with the data, so you'd need an external tool like JPGraph to create it. It does, however, provide you will the complete code to not only count the total visits from an IP but also which resources were hit and how many times they've been accessed. The backend is a SQLite database accessed through PHP.

Antony Dovgal has announced a tool that can help you find out where issues are in your code - specifically places where too much work is being done and gumming up the works. The Pinba statistics server for PHP that gathers UDP data from the PHP processes and makes it available for parsing/graphing.

What is it? It's a daemon gathering information sent by PHP processes by UDP. In the same time Pinba acts as a read-only storage engine for MySQL, so you can use good ol' SQL to access the data. [...] There is no need to store that information for further analysis, therefore Pinba doesn't actually store the data - it keeps it only for 15 minutes (you can change that, of course), which is more than enough to update graphs.

You can find out more about the project on its (wiki) site including links to the latest downloads (version 0.0.3 at the time of this post).

In this recent post to his blog Michael Caplan looks at a feature of PHP that's sometimes forgotten when pushing out larger chunks of data - flushing.

As a recluse who prefers hiding behind servers rather than dancing around your web browser's canvas, I was intrigued with their server side recommendations - however sparse they may be. In particular, flushing generated head content early to speed up overall page delivery and rending time was a technique new to me.

Michael looks at what "flushing generated head content" means and includes a scenario - pulling the top palettes from the COLOURlovers site - and some performance stats on page load time and response time directly from the server (complete with graphs).

Correcting himself from some previous comments concerning PHP 5 versus PHP 4 usage among developers, Marco Tabini has posted something new to his blog with some updated stats.

In the past, I have not been shy about sharing my opinion that the impending death of PHP 4 would have wreaked all sorts of havoc over the PHP world. I am glad to say that I've been wrong - dead wrong, in fact - and that I have never been as happy to be so far off the mark before.

According to a readers survey that the php|architect magazine ran (about a year ago even) PHP 5 is stronger than ever, taking up well over sixty percent of the usage with only a small part still hanging with PHP 4. Check out his graph for the full rankings.

In a recent post to his blog Patrick Allaert takes a look at benchmarking what Zend Platform has to offer against its open source brothers, Xdebug and APC.

The benchmark has been realized on an Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz with 2Gb of RAM running Gentoo with a 2.6.25-r7 linux kernel. ab, the Apache Benchmark tool, has been used for the benchmark with 3000 requests and three concurrency modes: -c1, -c5 and -c50 which represents respectively 1, 5 and 50 simultaneous users. The application tested is eZ Publish 4.0.1 with default configuration using the "plain_site" example.

He tested with a number of different PHP installations including a base install of PHP 5.2.6, one including APC, another with APC+Xdebug and others with the Zend Platform. The resulting stats are included as well as a graph showing their relationships to each other. The installs using the bytecode caching came out on top (obviously) with the APC installations being much faster than the accelerated Zend Platform.

In this new post to his Oracle blog, Chris Jones shows how to set up DBMS_OUTPUT to work with the OCI8 extension available for PHP.

Immediately after OOW, Alison and I have got straight into updating the Underground PHP & Oracle Manual. We've had our heads right down. [...] When reviewing the DBMS_OUTPUT section I tried using a PIPELINED PL/SQL function and found a significant speed improvement over the basic method.

He shows a few different methods for getting it working and includes both the code, SQL to create the functions and a bit of stats at the end showing which method is the fastest (the pipelined version wins out by quite a bit every time).