Ever wonder what it takes to crash PHP, well here is a quick guide ;-). Technically speaking PHP being a high level language should not crash, but reality speaks for itself. By knowing what could make PHP crash it may be possible to implement various safety mechanisms in your PHP configuration that would prevent users from crashing your PHP. This is quite important since a crash is not only a 'bad thing' [tm] in general but can also have several adverse affect on the web server potentially creating a possibility for a local DOS (Denial of Service). So without further ado here is the current crash list: Stack overflow. PHP does not have any internal stack protection choosing to rely upon the system stack without any protection. This means that if you have a recursive function or a method PHP will eventually crash. function a() { a(); } a(); There are 2 solutions to this problem, 1 avoid using recursive functions they are generally a bad idea anyway, and if you MUST use them implement some counter using...

Lately it seems that the possibility of PHP developers agreeing on something is about as likely as peace in the middle-east being declared overnight. After about a two week cease fire, following the long and bloody fight about studlyCaps aka suckyCaps, which ended with a sound defeat of the forces of sanity & reason the PHP developer community is at it again. Once more we can thank [url=http://coggeshall.org]John Coggeshall[/url] for this bit of entertainment, this time centered around wondrous PHP5 feature called "Exceptions". As you may or may not know in PHP5 it is possible to throw exceptions, which you can then catch and theoretically through this process simply error checking process and make it easier to write code. John proposed that all error messages raised by OO code would report errors by throwing exceptions rather then using the current error reporting mechanism. Technically the idea is sound good, since it would allow reduction in the number of error checks, allowing all error tracking be perfor...

If Porsche can have an SUV, I can have a blog! While this is not technically the very post, it is the first official online rant by your's truly. Well, that's not entirely true either, since I rant on a regular basis on [url=http://news.php.net/group.php?group=php.internals]internals mailing list[/url] about wide variety of topics. But let's ignore the facts for a moment, they only tend to get in the way of things. Anyhow, on with the introduction. I finally decided to get of my lazy ass and design a site for myself. Rather amusing, given that I've been directly and indirectly involved in the design of hundreds of websites in the past. For the moment only the blog is online, however I will add other tidbits in the near future. The biggest difficulty was lack of a good (short) domain. Despite having a fairly rare name, that I tend to spell differently that some of my namesakes (Ilia vs Ilya) this had proven to be quite a challenge. All common domain extensions were taken with the expiry date no where in si...

My inner workaholic is hard at work making sure my daily work load does not drop below the minimum of 12 hours. Consequently I will be writing another article for PHP|Architect in addition to the one (404 handling) that will be published in April's issue. This time I will foray into the exciting world ;) of making complex URL requests via PHP through the newly introduced context parameter in addition to the old favorite, cURL. On the positive note, Marco will have an absolutely 'smashing time' trying to make sense out of my drivel. MUWAHAHAHAHA!

May 3 - 5 Amsterdam, Netherlands [url]http://www.phpconference.com/[/url] At this conference I will be giving my two favorite talks. One about SQLite and the other about optimization of PHP. Here is a detailed description of the talks themselves for those who are interested in attending. [b]Accelerating PHP Applications without changing their Source.[/b] A detailed tutorial on how to increase speed of PHP applications via third party tools, environment tuning and various compiler tricks. Introduction of opcode caching mechanisms, review of their capabilities and a comparison of their performance benefits. Analysis of various proxy caching mechanisms and webserver tuning parameters. Overview of OS and environment parameters that can bring significant performance benefits. [b]Indepth Overview of SQLite Database and its PHP Interface.[/b] detailed tutorial on how to increase speed of PHP applications via third party tools, environment tuning and various compiler tricks. Introduction of opcode caching mecha...