Professional PHP

Larry Garfield has an interesting set of benchmarks covering many of PHP’s magic methods. His results correspond pretty well to my own benchmarks in the area. The thing to take away is that its not necessarily the overhead of the magic methods, but rather what you do inside them. Its hard to [...]

Derick Rethans has posted the notes from the recent PHP 6 meeting in Paris. All I can say is wow! PHP has a bright future. Good job guys.
I’ve also been impressed with the new upgrade notes for 5.1. Good job there, too.
I’ve read over the whole thing and I like what [...]

I wrote earlier about flawed microbenchmarks. Today on sitepoint, there was a post on the performance of single versus double quotes in PHP based on a microbenchmark:

The reasoning behind this speedup is that when the PHP compiler encounters a string constant beginning with a double quote, the string itself must be parsed and special [...]

Anatomy of a flawed microbenchmark highlights some of the problems involved in creating microbenchmarks (Java oriented).

The scary thing about microbenchmarks is that they always produce a number, even if that number is meaningless. They measure something, we’re just not sure what. Very often, they only measure the performance of the specific microbenchmark, and nothing more. [...]