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

Python 3000 presentation by Guido van Rossum, author of Python, at Google TechTalks (video) also given at ACCU 2006 conference in Oxford on April 19, 2006 (PPT slides)

Interesting quotes:

• Python started as skunkoworks project
• Get rid of depricated features
• Python 3000 = Python 3.0 = Py3k
• First alpha: not before next year
• … more Python specific stuff

Presentation by Larry Wall at OSDC::Isreal::2006 about Perl 5 and Perl 6 and Perl in general (gzipped PPT, mp3, transcript)

Some quotes:

• Irrationalities in Other Languages (5:54)
  • “If I wanted it fast, I’d write it in C” - That’s almost a direct quote from the original awk page.
  • “I thought of a way to do it so it must be right” - That’s obviously PHP. (laughter and applause
• Now, we’re changing from arrow to dot, because … because … Well, just ‘cuz I said so!

Presentation about Flickr using PHP (PDF, PPT)

Looks like flickr is BIG application and they managed to use PHP and MySQL to develop it.

Interesting quotes:

• Big system:
  • One programmer, one designer, etc.
  • ~60,000 lines of PHP code
  • ~60,000 lines of templates
  • ~70 custom smarty functions/modifiers
  • ~25,000 DB transactions/second at
  • ~1000 pages per second at peak
• Snapshot of db1.flickr.com
  • SELECT’s 44,220,588
  • INSERT’s 1,349,234
  • UPDATE’s 1,755,503
  • DELETE’s 318,439
  • 13 SELECT’s per I/U/D
• Stateless
  • We can bounce people around servers
  • Everything is stored in the database
  • Even the smarty cache\
  • “Shared nothing”
  • (so long as we avoid PHP sessions)
• JOIN’s are slow
• Normaliseddata is for sissies
• Keep multiple copies of data around
• Makes searching faster
• Have to ensure consistency in the application logic