Alvaro Videla has submitted a new post he's written up combining PHP and Erlang yet again, but this time he's using it to just store key/value pairs rather than for session data.

In this post I want to show you some of the neat things that can be done with the PHP-Erlang Bridge extension: A Key Value Store. Erlang comes packed with a Key Value store in the form of the ETS module. This is database is pretty fast and efficient for storing the Erlang terms in memory.

He tried a proof of concept to see how well the system would respond and was able to push over 150k items into the storage in one second. Sample code and instructions on getting the bridge working are included in the post.

Doru Moisa has written up a new post with some benchmarks comparing static calls versus singleton calls for a few different situations.

n the past several months I've been working with a rather large application built with symfony. I noticed that symfony makes heavy use of the Singleton pattern (other frameworks, like Zend do that too); everywhere in the code [...] Notice the amount of code needed by the Singleton pattern. Except the [shown] method, all the code in the class makes sure you have only one instance at any time during the execution.

He shows how to replace the standard singleton logic with something more specific and decides to test the two methods, seeing which of them can handle the most requests per second. His sample code is included for both the scripts called and the test script run. In all instances, the static call won out over the singleton instance easily. Even when tested with the Facebook compiler, the results were still the same.

In responding to some of the benchmarks posted about the speed and performance of Symfony 2 and how they truly compare to some of the other frameworks out there, Paul Jones has shared his thoughts and process on using his benchmarking system to get some differing results.

Fabien Potencier released Symfony 2.0.0alpha1 last week, along with some benchmarks showing its performance. I am glad to see that Fabien used my benchmarking system and methodology, and am happy to see that he is paying attention to the performance of his framework. I take this as an acceptance on his part that my methodology is legitimate and valid, and that it has value when comparing framework responsiveness.

Paul points out that Fabien's reporting is a bit inaccurate and goes on to talk about how his numbers are off and what a more correct version of the benchmarks would look like. He takes the testing methodology that Fabien used in his process and reapplies it to his benchmarking process using clean Amazon EC2 instances and Siege to run some response/request testing on software running on each framework. Numbers are run for three different comparisons and results are found...but you'll have to read the rest of the post to find those out.

WordPress users out there might find the latest post from Sameer Borate interesting if they're looking to squeeze the most performance out of their installation. It's a guide to using the FirePHP plugin for Firefox to benchmark your WordPress install's SQL.

The first thing you can do to rectify the situation is to find out where exactly the bottleneck resides by analyzing the time each SQL query takes to executes. Some inquisitive people among you may also be interested in knowing in what sequence the Wordpress SQL queries themselves are being run.

His method of benchmarking the SQL for the application uses some of the built in query logging in WordPress and some code dropped into your footer of your template to grab that information and push it back out to the waiting FireBug panel in your browser. The result looks something like this.

Christian Flickinger has written up a new blog post today showing some of the benchmarks he's worked up around the performance of various caching tools with the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft coming out as a leader.

The [WinCache] documentation makes no mention of Apache, only IIS. I decided to give it a try, and to my amazement, WinCache worked in Apache on Windows. After that I decided to compare the performance of WinCache with the other available options for Windows+Apache.

He defines his testing environment - hardware, software and the different opcode caching tools - and includes his testing technique. His results, measured in requests per second, are interesting but show that, for his configuration, the WinCache tool's performance topped the others on Windows.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today, there's an article from Keith Casey trying to set the record straight on some recent benchmarks put together by Zend and Acquia showing the performance of Drupal.

While I have not attempted to duplicate or validate any of their individual numbers or conclusion as a whole, I have been a Drupal user for well over five years and have launched 30+ sites on it.

With this experience to back him up, he points out a few things about the report that either needed work or were misleading in their results. This includes a limitation on the web server configurations they covered, the statistics on Windows performance (might turn people off to using it on this platform) and the emphasis being put in some of the wrong places - optimizing PHP versus Drupal.

He recommends that, like all studies and whitepapers like this, you take the results as only guidelines and examples, not as absolute facts. There's always going to be differences in hardware, software and configuration so what gave the big numbers and results for them might not work for you.

On Rdavid.net there's a post with the results from some tests run on hos much memory the Zend Framework and Doctrine used both with and without the APC caching.

I have decided to run with Doctrine as my Domain Model in Zend Framework projects. The thing is, if I'm going to commit to this, I need to know that applications I build in the future with the Zend Framework while using Doctrine as an integral part of the Model layer will not take performance hits from things like memory usage. With Doctrine doing a _lot_ of magic, I thought that this would be something that I wanted to see for myself. 4MB Memory to execute a simple Query?!?! Ffffff#$#!!!!

He includes the code for his testing procedure - creating a basic Doctrine object and running a "fetchOne" query and measuring the memory consumption with the memory_get_usage function. His results with the APC caching came out faster by about 60-70 percent.

Following the release of the 1.0 stable version of Microsoft's WinCache accelerator, Ivo Jansch took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see the response times of two applications, WordPress and SilverStripe, on a standard Windows hosting setup.

While it's important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article. The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists. I'm going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I'd like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

They used two servers with the same hardware specs and a the following software: WordPress & SilverStripe, the Web Platform Installer (Microsoft) and Zend Server. Check out the rest of the post for the results of their testing.

John Lim has updated his Optimizing PHP article with some new tips on caching data:

In this chapter, we explain why optimizing PHP involves many factors which are not code related, and why tuning PHP requires an understanding of how PHP performs in relation to all the other subsystems on your server, and then identifying bottlenecks caused by these subsystems and fixing them. We also cover how to tune and optimize your PHP scripts so they run even faster.

The article talks about true high performance, some of the bottlenecks that can keep you from it, tuning your Apache/IIS web server, tips on caching and some ways you can benchmark your application to figure out the best configuration for you.

Cal Evans has run some initial benchmarks on the newly released Windows PHP cache accelerator (see here) and the results are promising.

I do not pretend that this benchmark will mirror real-world results. It is simply an indicator that WinCache may improve the performance of your application because it did in the case of this one. Ok, so now we are clear about what we are seeing here. it's not a guarantee, it's just a pointer in the right direction. Let me take you through what I did and how I tested.

His tests were run on a machine with Windows 7, MySQL, the Web Platform Installer and PHP. He walks through the steps he followed to prepare the environment and to run his tests on a sample WordPress install both with and without the cache enabled. Check out his entry for the results!