Some time ago I wrote a post about using jMeter to benchmark performance of a web application. Apache jMeter is a great piece of software and I strongly recommend it but it’s not everything. You also need a high capacity bandwidth and a reliable hosts to run a test from. You often need more than a one testing server because it’s impossible to generate real concurrent connections from a single computer. The reason for that is a network interface can physically send only one packet at the time. People from BlazeMeter recognised this problem and created a web based service which makes the load testing very simple.
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How to improve PHP programming skills
“How do I improve my PHP skills?” is a recurring question on various boards and chats. It’s often asked by newbies but even experienced developers ask themselves the same thing. After all trying to be better is in the human nature. This is a deep question and when you think about it there isn’t a straight forward reply. Nevertheless I will try to give a comprehensive answer which hopefully is going to be useful not only to the beginners but also to the people with some commercial experience.
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Reading PHP session from Varnish Cache
In my previous post I showed how to integrate Varnish Cache with a PHP application. The example can solve various simple problems but it might not be enough for a complex software. A good example is a multilingual application. One URL can have multiple caches. You might also need to know more about a user (is he logged in? has he received a notification? etc) to make some additional caching decisions.
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Integrating Varnish Cache with a PHP application
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator. It stands in front of a web server and can cache any type of data. It stores data in memory and can speed up your application by a factor of 300-1000x depending on your architecture.
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The art of communication in the IT
Initially I wanted to write a post about working with contractors. I wanted to say how important and difficult it’s for both sides to fully understand requirements and expectations. It still might be a good post idea but there is no need to focus on a particular group. As live shows miscommunication occurs everywhere and on all levels.
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3 simple steps to boost performance of a PHP web application
Developers care about performance of their software. The problem is that they don’t usually have enough time for a proper optimisation. I would like to propose 3 relatively simple steps which won’t take much time and will improve a response time by at least 60%.
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Is Phalcon the promised land for PHP?
Have you heard yet about the full stack PHP framework called Phalcon? It’s written in C, it’s super fast, well documented and it brings lots of freshness into the PHP world. It has been around for awhile now but for some reason it’s been under my radar until now. Why is it so special? If you allow me I will here attempt to prove that this framework has a potential to change the game.
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