internals

Speaking at PHP UK 2014

Speaking
This post is over 4 years old and is probably out of date.

I’m pleased to announce I will be speaking at PHP UK in London. PHP UK will be on February 21st and 22nd.

I will be giving two talks, “PHP 5.NEXT: The New Bits”, which will cover PHP 5.6 (or whatever is appropriate come February!) and “PHP Performance: Under The Hood”, which will be a performance talk with an emphasis on what’s going on in internals.

This second talk is intended as a way to get to know more about the engine, how it works, and what’s really going on with your code.

Last time I went to PHP UK in 2012, it was one of the highlights of that year, and I fully expect it’ll be the same for me next year. I hope to see you there, tickets are on sale now!

Speaking at PHPBenelux 2014

Speaking
This post is over 4 years old and is probably out of date.

Three years ago I heard about this awesome conference in Belgium, PHPBenelux, and for the last two years I’ve been kicking myself for missing the CFP.

Well, this year, I didn’t miss it, and I got accepted!

I will be giving my new talk, “PHP Performance: Under The Hood”:

We’ve all experienced performance issues and we would typically turn to a profiler. Whether that’s something in userland, or a tool like xdebug or xhprof, the reason is the same: to figure out why our code is slow.

This talk will take that inspection a step further and look under the hood of PHP, at the C internals, for common performance problems.

If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly what your code is doing, and why ++$i is faster than $i++, this talk is for you.

I hope to see you there!

Everything You Need to Know About OpCode Caches

Video
This post is over 4 years old and is probably out of date.

Last year I wrote a talk called “Fast, Not Furious: How to Find and Fix Slow Code” — a performance talk covering profiling, memcache and some other stuff.

As I often do — to hedge my bets — I stuck a few slides on the end “just in case” I ran through everything too quickly and needed to fill in time.

These slides were on APC, the Alternative PHP Cache, and went just a little into tokens and how APC works under the hood.

I really enjoyed presenting those 6 slides, and I’ve been wanting to expand on that topic ever since then.

Well, after a few weeks of hard work, some input from some great people, including Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Smith and Julien Pauli, I’m so very happy to publish PHP Performance I: Everything You Need to Know About OpCode Caches.

This is a 17 page document (in it’s original format), also available (in somewhat abridged form) as a 20 minute screencast (Transcript/Slides)

Alongside this, we are also releasing the Engine Yard PHP Performance Tools. This is the start of a suite of tools to aid with improving PHP performance.

As you can probably guess, this is part 1 in a series; the next in the series will be published in late October.

The video is embedded below (though I highly recommend reading the full length document also) :