Archive for March, 2008|Monthly archive page
The Hitchhikers Guide to PHP Load Balancing
There was once a time when running a big (or popular) web application meant running a big web server. As your application attracted more users you would add more memory and processors to your server.
Today, the ‘one huge server’ paradigm has been replaced with the idea of having a large number of smaller servers which employ one or more methods of balancing the load (known as ‘load balancing’) across the entire group (known as a ‘farm’ or ‘cluster’). This is partly down to the fall in hardware prices which made this approach more viable.
The Truth About PHP Variables
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: internal memory, performance, php
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I wanted to write this post to clear up what seems to be a common misunderstanding in PHP – that using references when passing around large variables is a good way save memory. To fully explain this I will need to explain how PHP handles variables internally. I hope that you will find this interesting and useful and that it helps dispel some myths around references and memory management in PHP. First off, lets cover the basics…
Working With UK Postcodes
I was recently working on a project which needed to match a user with a county based on their (UK) postcode. In the end searched over Wikipedia and made extensive use of Google to come up with a small table which matches the postcode prefix with the postal town, county, and region.
How to Avoid Freelance Cabin Fever
I have been working as a freelancer for a few months now and I have to say it is wonderful. It is great being able to work where, when and (to some extent) on what I want. When I first went freelance it was more the ‘when’ and ‘on what’ aspects that I found appealing and I wasn’t overly worried about the ‘where’. After all, I (and I suspect many other web freelancers) found their interest in the web by tinkering away in their room until some ungodly hour of the night.
Fuzzy Searching in PHP: Part 1
For a while now I have been working on a developing a wiki application, both for personal projects and for use by clients. As part of this I needed to implement a search feature, allowing users to search the content on the wiki. At this point there were a few options open to me. All the content was stored in a MySQL database, so I could simply use a ‘LIKE’ statement against all the stored content, but there are several problems with this method:
Fuzzy Searching in PHP: Part 2
In part two we looked at how we spider our content and how that content can be stored in way which allows it to be searched. In part 2 I will show you how to actually perform searches on this indexed data.
Port Eighty Eight Blog Launches
I chose the name Port Eighty Eight as I want this blog to be a little ‘alternative’ to the other offerings out there[1]. I am planning to cover the more advanced aspects of web development, but I am happy to take requests for any areas you would like to hear me discuss. I am also going to be looking for other developers who would be interested in contributing to this blog, as I would like to avoid it becoming too PHP-focused.
