Slawek Lukasiewicz has posted about a handy tool that can be used to track memory consumption and performance in your PHP application - memtrack.

Application profiling can help us determine bottlenecks and possible problems during development. But sometimes we also need to diagnose problems in production environment. Frequent performance problems are connected with functions and methods using too much memory.

The tool allows you to set up thresholds for memory consumption and, if the scripts exceeds it, add warnings to your log files. He includes the simple instructions to install it (via PECL) and enable it in your php.ini. Some sample code to create a memory overvload is included to test it out. Configuration options let you set the limits and define functions to ignore if you know for sure there's trouble spots.

In a new tutorial posted to his blog today, Pierre-Alain Joye shows how to generate backtraces on a Windows machine without the need for a compiler installed.

How to get a back trace on windows without having to compile PHP has been an impossible task for many of us. The difficulty was to first succeed to compile php (given that you have a visual C++ installed). If you are in the middle of a bug hunting session, no need to say that setting up a windows build system is the last thing you like, especially if it is your first time. Thanks to Edin's window binary and MS Diagnostic Debug , it is now possible to have a backtrace in a couple of clicks.

To use the method you will need a few pieces of software to help out but all are available for free. Next up are the steps to get things set up (simple) and the creation of the backtrace to catch the error, complete with screenshots for the whole way. The end result is a nice, pretty error message output to the browser (Internet Explorer) that also dumps the backtrace for you to use.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted security tip #15 today, focusing on an easily forgotten aspect of web development (not just in PHP) - forgetting to remove temporary files.

As developers, most of us are very messy. I've worked on countless projects and at each either run across or left a trail of diagnostic files laying around. (info.php, test.php, doMe.php, etc.) These tiles, if found by someone with nefarious intent, can leak valuable information about your system.

Always remember to remove these types of files...as Cal puts it:

It would be a shame to spend all that time securing your application only to leave info.php or worse yet, a "quick piece of code" in test.php that could potentially leak dangerous information about your system. Don't help the ad guys any more than you have to.