Facebook releases HipHop, its optimized version of PHP, via open source
With the continued need to achieve ever greater performance and speed in the face of exponential growth of users, Facebook has given much to do to be successful in optimizing the PHP runtime that underlie all the logic of operation and delivery of social networking features user side.
In fact Facebook has announced that he had worked secretly during the last two years in a project that had as purpose to create a completely rewritten and optimized version of PHP can also translate PHP scripts into C + + compiled with GCC.
By using this particular version of PHP, baptized HipHop, Facebook claims to be able to obtain a reduction in the use of CPU in the order of 50%!
The effort must not have been trivial, given that in quantitative terms are written as 300,000 lines of code and were performed more than 5000 unit tests 
The fact that we seek to optimize the performance of PHP is not new: in fact there are already many modules as APC and eAccelerator are able to operate in a transparent system of intelligent caching, and others like Roadsend and PHC to reconstruct the PHP script in C. Nevertheless HipHop is an 'interesting news, especially because he has as a test a "site" of the size of Facebook!
If you are interested in further details at a technical level you can find all the details directly on Facebook.
Rediscover Windows 3.11 on your browser
January 26, 2010 by David
Filed under In evidence, Internet
I do not know how many of you have actually used Windows 3.11, or at least were able to see, given the fact that we are talking about 15 years ago (it was the successor to Windows 95).
Personally, I had maintained a rather vague recollection until I stumbled on the site michaelv.org.
Installing Apache2 with PHP5 and MySQL on Ubuntu 9.10 in 5 easy steps
November 26, 2009 by David
Filed under Unix / Linux
A 'Setup Apache2 with PHP5 and MySQL on Linux is usually also known as LAMP (acronym indicating precisely L inux, A pache, M ySQL, P HP) and represents the typical configuration needed to activate what is the web platform par excellence, which can be characterized as being the most popular and used worldwide: WordPress, phpBB, and Drupal are some of the web applications based on LAMP.
In particular, in this article we will see how to install in a few moments Apache2 with PHP5 and MySQL on Ubuntu 9.10. Read more
Setup Apache 2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5 on Windows in 5 minutes
Although we all agree that Linux is the ideal platform for such applications, it can still happen to also have the need to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on Windows. The main problem in this case is not so much to install individual applications, how to configure for smooth integration. And on Windows this may be more confusing than Linux in which the steps to be performed are very clear and precise.
In this situation we can assist XAMPP, a special installer made for Windows (although still there are versions for Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux) that installs in a single operation a comprehensive package of Apache, MySQL and PHP pre-configured and ready to use, complete with a unified management console. Indeed, to be precise the bundle of XAMPP installed and configured on your PC the following applications:
- Apache HTTPD 2.2.8 + Openssl 0.9.8g
- MySQL 5.0.51a
- PHP 5.2.5
- PHP 4.4.8
- phpMyAdmin 2.11.4
- FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.25
- Mercury Mail Transport System 4:52
Setup Apache2, MySQL and PHP5 on Ubuntu Linux
March 20, 2007 by David
Filed under Unix / Linux
Last weekend I decided to give a purpose to an old PC (Pentium III with 128MB RAM, 30GB HD) on which a few months ago I installed Ubuntu Server 6.0.6.
As always what I was missing was an online test environment that allowed me to make the modifications and new features to add to my sites to avoid doing hot, I needed to install and configure Apache2, MySQL and PHP5.
Read more
