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XHGui on VM, Storage on Host
05 January 2015
Read moreI'm doing some performance tuning on a project at the moment and my favourite tool is still XHGui - but it's designed to run on the same machine as its victim and since this is a vagrant VM, the chances of me destroying the machine and therefore the data are pretty high! Instead, I set it up to store the data onto the host and I thought I'd share how I did that.
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ZCE Questions Pack Unavailable
16 December 2014
Read moreThere is a change in legislation for selling digital goods to anyone in the EU, and to cut a long story short this means that my ZCE Questions Pack will be unavailable at least in the short term. The pack is intended for anyone preparing for ZCE, it has general …
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How to Choose PHP Hosting
09 October 2014
Read moreI've been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting.
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Joind.in at PHPNW's Hackathon
25 September 2014
Read moreWith a week to go, everyone attending PHPNW is starting to get excited. One of my highlights of the weekend is always the hackathon; as an open source project lead it's fantastic to meet new contributors and get a chance to hack in person with them and the more established people from the project.
This year will be no exception: PHPNW's Hackathon is on the Friday evening - you need a conference ticket, and you need to tick the "hackathon ticket" box. Joind.in will be there and we've got a very big todo list so if you are looking for something to hack on, then look no further!
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Compiling PHP Extensions
29 August 2014
Read moreThere are lots of reasons why you might like to compile your own PHP extensions. For me those reasons are usually:
The extension isn't available on pecl (e.g. uprofiler)
The extension is on pecl, but you need the newest version or a branch with a particular feature or fix in it, perhaps for testing
You are fixing an extension yourself (yay, we need more people like you!)
Related: If you followed my previous post on compiling PHP, be aware that in the ``php/bin/`` folder there is a pecl binary that will install extensions correctly for whichever version of PHP it belongs to, so you may not need to read the rest of this post. However if you do, the paths follow on from the examples in that post.
I haven't seen a really approachable guide anywhere, we tend to speak of extensions in hushed tones, and actually it isn't particularly tricky so here is my quick how-to guide.
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Running Multiple Versions of PHP
19 August 2014
Read moreWhen I advise people about upgrading their PHP version, I say things like "just run your test suite with the new version" "just grab the new version and try your site with the built-in webserver". A couple of people recently have asked for more detail on how to actually achieve these things so here's a quick primer on getting new PHP without touching anything to do with your existing PHP installation.
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New PHP Videos on OReilly.com
30 July 2014
Read moreI am delighted to announce that I have new video titles available! I'm delighted for two reasons: selfishly, because these things take a lot of prep and I am pleased they are done; but also because I think it is very good news that a key industry player such as O'Reilly recognises PHP's place in the world and works hard to publish new content in this area.
There are two videos available: PHP Web Services
and Intermediate PHP
(subtitle: a bunch of things Lorna thinks will make developers' lives and applications better!), you can click through (disclaimer: affiliate links!) to get more information and a detailed chapter outline for each course. I hope that either or both of them will be useful to you.
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Using Phing with Travis CI
17 July 2014
Read moreWe've started using Travis CI on one of my projects to run some build processes to check that everything looks good before we merge/deploy code. One thing I ran into quite quickly was that I wanted to install phing in order to use the build scripts we already have …
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Quickly add Amazon Cloudfront as a CDN
15 July 2014
Read moreRight now I'm working on an application which is experiencing lots of interest - and therefore lots of load! We needed to look at ways of trying to bring down the pressure on the servers, and decided to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for our image files. It was surprisingly painless to implement once I got into it so here it is in case it's helpful.
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Logging to Stdout with Monolog
06 June 2014
Read moreMy worker scripts have really basic logging (as in, they echo when something happens, and I can see those in the supervisord logs). Which is kind of okay, but I wanted to at least add timestamps in to them, and maybe send emails when something REALLY bad happened.
I'm a …
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PHP 5.6 Benchmarks
19 May 2014
Read moreA while ago I did some benchmarks on how different versions of PHP perform in comparison to one another. This isn't a performance measure in absolute terms, this was just benchmarking them all on the same laptop while it wasn't doing anything else, and averaging the time it took to run the benchmark script.
Recently I ran it again for versions PHP 5.3 through PHP 5.6 and I thought I'd share my results:
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Beanstalk, Pheanstalk and Priorities
07 May 2014
Read moreI've got an application that uses Beanstalkd to queue up messages, and some PHP worker scripts that grab messages from the queue and process them. Messages get added by the web application, but can also be added by cron - and when I add a bunch of messages via cron, I …
