Sebastian Bergmann has posted the results of some benchmarking on the compilation he's done on the branches of PHP from version 3.0 all the way up to 5.3-CVS.

As people keep asking me for an update to my previous benchmarks (PHP / GCC / ICC Benchmark, PHP 5.1 / GCC Benchmark (Update), and PHP 5.1 Performance, I quickly ran a new benchmark today.

He rendered the results out into a series of charts defining the number of total seconds taken for the compile and how long each of the components took. It's impressive to see how much of a jump there was between the 3.0 series and 4.3.

He also includes his compile settings (and machine information) as well as the numbers for the results if you'd like to graph them out yourself.

On the BitFlux blog today, Christian Stocker talks about the patch for PHP that allows for a simple progress meter when files are uploading.

Showing a real progress bar when uploading large files is an often requested (and quite informative) feature, which is not easily doable with the way the upload handling works in PHP. There is a patch available for PHP 4.4 and 5.0, which made it nevertheless possible, but some php core files itself needed to be patched for that.

He notes, however, that a new sort of patch for the same thing has just been committed to the PHP_5_2 branch, making the previous patch a thing of the past. It's completely new and you can check out the code here or the svnweb here.