Tech Presentations

Presentation about how PHP is used at Yahoo!, by Michael J. Radwin given at MySQL User Conference on April 26, 2006 (PPT slides) (previously at Zend/PHP Conference – PDF version).

Some quotes:

• May 2002: yScript -> PHP
• Why we picked PHP
  1. Designed for web scripting
  2. High performance
  3. Large, Open Source community
     • Documentation, easy to hire developers
  4. “Code-in-HTML” paradigm
  5. Integration, libraries, extensibility
  6. Tools: IDE, debugger, profiler
• ./configure –disable-all
• Security: open_basedir, allow_url_fopen = Off, display_errors = Off, safe_mode = Off; input_filter hook
• Performance: Opcode Caches, PHP Extensions in C++
• Globalization: PHP Unicode (2006)

Historical trail of talks about PHP at Yahoo! (worth reading too):

• One Year of PHP at Yahoo! on October 23, 2003 at PHPCon 2003 and July 9, 2003 at OSCON 2002 (HTML, PDF)
• Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! on October 25, 2002 at PHPCon 2002 (HTML, PDF)

Presentation by Michael J. Radwin given at OSCON 2006 on July 27, 2006 (previously given at ApacheCon 2005).
Slides in HTML, PDF, PPT.

Interesting quotes:

• Still running Apache 1.3, actively porting to Apache 2.2 (2006)
• What’s wrong with threads?
  • too hard for most programmers to use
  • even for experts, development is painful
• Custom log files format
• Signal-free log rotation
• Bandwidth reduction
  • Smaller 30x bodies
  • Custom gzip
• No need for StartServers, MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers – just MaxClients (constant pool size)
• Accept Filtering on FreeBSD
• SendBufferSize 229376, NO_LINGCLOSE – don’t wait for the client to read the response
• YahooHostHtmlComment
• SSL Acceleration cards, stunnel
• ysar