Premature Optimization

I just committed Zend_Service_PayPal to the Zend Framework laboratory. It’s basically a partial implementation of the PayPal NVP interface - and was committed so that people could enjoy what I already have written, as well as provide feedback, before the proposal is accepted (or rejected).

You can check the laboratory out from Subversion here: http://framework.zend.com/svn/laboratory/ - be sure to post any feedback either in the fw-webservices@lists.zend.com mailing list, in the proposal page on actually, here.

Today I learned about the (relatively new) realpath_cache_size and realpath_cache_ttl php.ini directives, which were added in PHP 5.1.0.

PHP 5.1.x and up caches the real path of include files, thus avoiding the extra system call when include_once and require_once are used (or at least, this is what I understood - hope I didn’t confuse anything).

Apparently, the cache size is configurable, and if you’re system has lots of RAM, you can increase realpath_cache_size - the default is 16Kbyte, which means you’ll have 16Kbyte of cache per Apache process. Almost every decent production system can handle an additional 16KBytes per process, and as I understand, this could have a positive effect on performance in applications that have lots of include files.

I updated the WordPress installation running this blog to the latest version. Along the way, I added some widgets to the sidebar. It seems to work well and look good - but if you encounter any problems with the blog, drop me a line (by commenting I guess).

Thanks!