The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted that looks at a framework that could "make PHP go even faster", the Blink framework.

Blink was built to improve high performance applications that consume a lot of server resources, and it uses the Swoole PHP extension to achieve this goal. As an example, we will build a Blink powered notejam for our demo.

First the tutorial walks you through the installation of the Swoole extension (they choose from PEAR but you can also install from GitHub). Next up they install the Blink framework with a new project and fire up the built-in server to ensure it's working correctly. With that up and running they show how to configure the framework/server and get into building the sample "notejam" application. They make use of Twig for templating the frontend and several Illuminate packages for the database, console and filesystem functionality.

The remainder of the post walks through the actual code for the application:

• creating and using the "notes" table
• working with routing
• creating templates
• working with user management

Finally, with this system in place they show how to have a user verify themselves and add a new note to their list.

On the UserSnap blog Luciano Mammino has provided a guide to building fast applications in the cloud using PHP and several tools and techniques. He offers a list of six rules to follow to make building the applications fast (and fast applications).

In this post Luciano highlighted some of the most common principles you should consider while building high performing web applications (specifically on the backend part). The following concepts discussed here can be applied to any language and framework. Though this post will cover some concrete examples, design patterns and tools that are mostly used in the PHP ecosystem.

His list of rules includes tips like:

• Avoid premature optimization
• Defer the work you don’t need to do immediately
• Use cache when you can
• Prepare your app for horizontal scalability when possible

Each point comes with a paragraph or two of explanation as to why it's an issue to watch out for and some tips to help prevent it as well as tools that can help.

Luciano Mammino has posted six tips for blazing fast web applications to his site. These tips aren't as much specific to the code (though they're related) as they are general good practices around architecture, development work and common issues.

In this post I will try to highlight some of the most common principles that you have to take under consideration when you want to achieve a great level of performance while building a web application (specifically on the backend part). I believe the concepts discussed here can be applied to any language and framework even if, due to my specific experience, I will mention some examples, design patterns, conventions and tools that are mostly used in the PHP world.

His post lists out six main rules along with some description and links to other tools for each:

• Avoid premature optimization
• Do the minimum amount of work to solve the problem
• Defer the work you don't need to do immediately
• Use cache when you can
• Understand and avoid the N+1 query problem with relational databases
• Prepare your app for horizontal scalability when possible

There's lots of good tools mentioned here so find one that fits your needs and helps solve the issue. There's also some good articles mentioned, giving more information about a particular topic or other perspectives on how to solve it a different way.

Lorna Mitchell has posted some preliminary PHP7 benchmarks from the current alpha release (alpha2). Good news - it's fast....very fast.

If you know anything at all about PHP7, you probably know it's fast. But did you know how fast? The alpha is out and looks very robust, so I decided I would create a new set of benchmarks to include it. Graphs first, disclaimers later :)

This graph shows the time it takes for each version of PHP to perform the same task, on average, with oldest PHP on the left and moving forward in time. [..] The benchmark is the Zend/bench.php that lives in the PHP sourcecode (run ten times for each version of PHP using the php7dev VM on an average laptop, and then the mean result for each version calculated). The script runs through a series of taxing algorithms, giving a sense of how quickly a series of computational instructions can be executed.

She also talks briefly about how this can effect more real-world applications, how realistic it is to upgrade from older installs (much less painful on 5.5 or 5.6) and some things you can do to help improve PHP7 for everyone. This includes testing, working on bugs and adding extensions to this list to ensure they're made PHP7 compatible.

The DooPHP framework has officially laid their claim on being one of the "fastest MVC based PHP frameworks available" with features like URI routing, RESTful API support, ORM support and a flexible license.

DooPHP is a rapid development framework for PHP using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM, reduces development costs and helps developers write less code. The framework itself is designed with main focus on its core performance rather than the wide range of features. It is for those who need a more structured project but do not wish to spend much time on learning a framework or a new language.

Features included in the framework are things like: internationalization support, templating, logging/profiling, E_STRICT compliance and being "Ajax friendly". If you're interested in seeing just how fast the framework is in comparison, check out their benchmarks.

They seem a little bit suspicious, though, in comparison to some other numbers generated by the Yii framework project.

Recently on his blog Cormac has posted a quick little tutorial on making things a bit faster when rejecting file uploads in PHP that are just a bit too large.

Discovered today you can report to a user if the file(s) he/she is uploading is too large without having to wait for the file to finish uploading by checking $_FILES.

The key is the "error" field in the $_FILES array that actually returns its value before the upload is finished if the size of the file is larger than the MAX_FILE_SIZE set in the POSTed information of the form. The Content-length header is sent before the actual payload (the file upload data) so PHP can interpret that before the upload starts and kick it back with an error if it's too large.

On the SitePoint PHP blog, David Peterson shares some of the comments and thoughts that Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) had recently on a good range of topics (including frameworks).

This is the fist time I have heard Rasmus Lerdorf speak and it was entertaining to say the least. Refreshing would another way to describe it, I enjoy hearing real opinions and not holding back - Rasmus doesn't hold back.

He talked about frameworks (and why they're not the best thing for the job), how you can make PHP fast (or can you?) and some mention of the semantic web and Drupal.

Christopher Jones has posted an announcement about the latest release of the PECL OCI8 package (version 1.3.2 Beta) hitting the streets:

I've released PECL OCI8 1.3.2 Beta - the latest release of PHP's OCI8 extension with support for Connection Pooling and Fast Application Notification. The release is based on the current PHP 5.3 development branch.

He notes another change in this release - a "session release" bit of functionality persistent connections will do when nothing is referencing them anymore, mking them work a bit more like normal connections. Issues that could be caused by this can be corrected with a new setting (oci8.old_oci_close_semantics) in your php.ini.

Nick Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he's created to help make a little bit of sense out of the links that go flying past in your twitter client - tweetmeme.

What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio. This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing.

Most of the work was done by another developer, Stuart Dallas as one of four that worked on the project together. It's written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme's blog for more information on the service.