Tuesday, February 16. 2010Dutch PHP Business Seminar
On March 2nd, we are organizing another PHP management seminar in The Netherlands. In one afternoon, we'll update IT managers, CIOs, CEOs, CTOs and (web) development managers on some of the latest developments in PHP development. Topics this year are:
Continue reading "Dutch PHP Business Seminar"
Posted by Anouk Ilic
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09:54
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Defined tags for this entry: business, cloud, cloud computing, conference, management, performance, scalability, seminar, services, soa, webservices
Friday, February 12. 2010Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective
One of the reasons so many people choose PHP for their web development is that it's fast. Not necessarily in the gazillion-requests-per-second sense, but in terms of developer productivity. One sentence you'll hear me say regularly is: "PHP is not pretty, but it gets the thing done, and gets it done well" and even in my 'PHP in the Enterprise' evangelization, the productivity argument is one I often use.
Every once in a while things happen that prove this point, and this is a post about such proof. Continue reading "Productivity in PHP from a fun perspective"
Posted by Ivo Jansch
in planetphp
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08:25
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Defined tags for this entry: contest, dotnet, engineeringworld, lines of code, oracle, performance, php, productivity, sew10
Monday, December 21. 2009Disruptive events and information flow
This weekend The Netherlands (and many other countries too, but for the purpose of example I'll stick to NL) experienced something that happens only every few years. We had up to 25 centimeters of snow, which is unusual for us, so it disrupts life significantly. On sunday, buses and trains were canceled, destinations became unreachable, and at Schiphol airport alone, over 700 people had to spent the night because it was impossible to get anywhere.
Snow continued to fall Sunday evening, so this morning most news outlets expected chaos in traffic. The Ibuildings Netherlands offices already advised all its staff to work from home on Monday, but not every company is able to tackle it that way, so the number one question for many people this morning was: "Will I be able to get to work?". The answer to the question should be simple: either trains and buses ride normally, they have delays, or they don't ride at all. Still, many of the Dutch public transport companies struggled to get that information across. Read on for an overview and an analysis, using the public transport companies of the Dutch major cities as an example of how important it is to do 'peak management'. Continue reading "Disruptive events and information flow"
Posted by Ivo Jansch
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08:20
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Defined tags for this entry: graceful degradation, peak management, peak traffic, performance, public transport, scalability
Thursday, November 26. 2009PHP Caching on Windows: A managers perspective
Putt's law:
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. -- Archibald Putt Recently Microsoft released its opcode caching solution for PHP on Windows. On techPortal we've published a benchmark. In this article, I want to look at things from a manager's perspective. As PHP extends its reach further into corporate networks, IT managers have yet another technology that they have to understand so that they can properly deploy. In many situations, PHP code is being developed that - running on its own - creates a bad user experience because of the nature of the language. Because each PHP script has to integrate and compile all of the files with code in them before the results can be output, the more complex systems get, the longer it can take for scripts to respond to their client. Much of this delay, and the user unhappiness that always accompanies it, can be mitigated with the proper opcode caching solution. Continue reading "PHP Caching on Windows: A managers perspective"
Posted by Cal Evans
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10:35
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Defined tags for this entry: apc, caching, opcode caching, performance, wincache, zend optimizer, zend server
Monday, August 31. 2009The Problem With Benchmarks
Sometime around the early 90's I started noticing that major companies like Microsoft and Oracle started adding provisions to the EULA's stating that the licenses forbade users from publishing benchmarks about the product. Evil Big Brother implications aside, I now am beginning to at least see why they think it is a good idea.
The fact of the matter is benchmarking today's web based computer software is almost impossible. In past years, the software was easier to isolate and the number of variables could be controlled so that a useful metric could be produced for buyers to be able to compare two similar products. Today however, when software is increasingly being deployed on the web, there are too many moving parts that have to be taken into consideration. In any modern web application web servers, database servers, third party APIs and the network all have to be factored in when benchmarking an application. Any one of these not functioning correctly could cause your benchmarks to report false data. Continue reading "The Problem With Benchmarks"
Posted by Cal Evans
in PHP
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16:48
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Defined tags for this entry: benchmarks, performance
Thursday, April 23. 2009Surviving a plane crash - The nu.nl case study
About 2 months ago, Erik Snoeijs posted a story about the NU.nl backend, a project we did for the largest news site in The Netherlands.
Back then, we already planned to write a follow up post about the front-end technology. Where the back-end focuses on flexibility and ease of use for the Nu.nl editors, the front-end focuses completely on very high performance and getting the news out to the site's readers as quickly as possible. Continue reading "Surviving a plane crash - The nu.nl case study" Friday, January 23. 2009Boost performance with parallel processing
In the past couple of weeks I had to implement parallel processing with PHP twice. Since it was very effective I thought I'd share it with you all.
The idea of parallel processing is when you take an atomic transaction or operation called a 'process' and run a couple of those at the same time. Many programming languages support this via threading or forking. Since most computers have multi core CPU's and can handle multiple processes at the same time your application can benefit from having multiple transactions running at once. Continue reading "Boost performance with parallel processing" Tuesday, August 12. 2008The definition of evil
Recently a colleague stated that in theory, caching could be considered 'evil'.
Now 'evil' is a very broad term which is used a lot in the IT community, but what does it really mean when we're talking about technical solutions? I asked around, but couldn't find a clear cut definition, so I went searching... Continue reading "The definition of evil"
Posted by Boy Baukema
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16:11
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Defined tags for this entry: best practices, browser, caching, development, evil, optimization, performance, scalability
Monday, April 7. 2008ATK and Caching
In previous posts by my colleagues Martin and Lineke you could already read that caching is becoming important when you are going to build scalable web applications. For many projects we use ATK as our framework, but it didn't have a caching API. So in the core of our products we only use file caching because that's available on all systems. If you wanted to use an external cache, for example Zend Platform, this was mostly done in a custom module. This made sure we didn't get large if-constructions in the core products to check for availability of an external cache.
That was, until yesterday... because now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval. At this moment atkCache has support for the following caching backends: Continue reading "ATK and Caching"
Posted by Sandy Pleyte
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16:41
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Defined tags for this entry: apc, atk, caching, eaccelerator, memcached, performance, xcache, zend platform
Monday, March 17. 2008How we build scalable web applications
There is lots of information available on how to build scalable web applications. I thought it would be nice to share a little bit of how we at Ibuildings build scalable web applications.
Often we're dealing with large applications that need to scale very well. Sometimes this is due to high load/traffic but, it can also be that the web application is used in many ways. For example an application can have a heavily used CRM like back-end system. The front-end website uses the same system to publish information from it. You can imagine that if you didn't set it up correctly and the load increases on the back-end, it affects the website users and vice versa. Continue reading "How we build scalable web applications"
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Tuesday, February 16. 2010Dutch PHP Business SeminarFriday, February 12. 2010Productivity in PHP from a fun perspectiveMonday, December 21. 2009Disruptive events and information flowThursday, November 26. 2009PHP Caching on Windows: A managers perspectiveMonday, August 31. 2009The Problem With BenchmarksThursday, April 23. 2009Surviving a plane crash - The nu.nl case studyFriday, January 23. 2009Boost performance with parallel processingTuesday, August 12. 2008The definition of evilMonday, April 7. 2008ATK and CachingMonday, March 17. 2008How we build scalable web applications |
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