The slides from my talk at DevConf in Moscow are now up and can be downloaded here. Probably the biggest, or at the very minimum the 2nd biggest audience I've had a PHP Conference and the first time I had to give a PHP talk in Russian (with occasional slippage into English ;-p). Seemed to go pretty well.

Finally managed to upload my slides from my ConFoo PHP 5.3 == Awesome! talk. Slides Thanks for all the attendees, especially those who asked questions ;-)

To paraphrase Marco Tabini if you work with PHP you must be doing so in a pretty deep cave to have not heard of HipHop for PHP and the fervor around it the prior to its official announcement this morning by Facebook. I had a fortune to be part of the small group of PHP community people who were invited to take a peak at its technology prior to its official release in January. And I must admit it had been quite amusing to read some of the conjectures people were making about what it actually, given how off the mark most of their guesses were. So what is HipHop? In the tersest of terms HipHop is a tool that converts PHP code into C++ code that when combined with a PHP compatible engine and extensions (ports of some native PHP extensions Facebook uses) library also written in C++ can be compiled using GCC into a binary. This binary can then be ran on a command line or as a web server daemon that utilizes libevent. According to Facebook this can speed up applications by up to 50%, which is a prett...

I will be speaking again this year at PHP Quebec conference, which has now been renamed to Confoo and covers many more topics then just PHP, which should make things even more interesting. With over 100 talks things looks to be an amazing conference, my own talk with cover PHP 5.3 awesomeness ;-)

If you are using PHP, chances are that at some point you needed to serialize PHP data, whether it was transparently done for you inside the PHP's session handler or directly so that complex PHP data types (objects & arrays) could be stored in DB or files, most people have done this. The default way of doing it is via a native PHP serializer, which creates a clear-text version of the data, which if you are serializing a fair bit of information ends up being rather verbose (read: BIG). This means that you end up having to store more data in memory, read more data from disk, etc... all of which slow down your application. As I was reading docs on Andrei's new memcache extension (memcached) I came across a binary serialization extension called Igbinary written by Sulake Dynamoid Oy. This extension promised much more optimal serialization routines by using binary, rather then a clear text format. Sounded, good so I decided to run a few benchmarks on it. For my tests I simply grabbed a whole pile of our...