php

With the Command Line Interpreter for PHP (most of the time called php-cli or php5-cli), you can check if one single file contains syntax errors by simply calling

php5 -l file.php

The problem with that is, if you have many files to check, on the command line you might easily spend your time typing filenames.

(Read the update below before starting to copy-paste) To install Xhprof on PHP5.4 on Ubuntu (assuming you've already got PHP5.4 from Andrej or somewhere safe) in order to measure the load of Chamilo 1.10 dev (you need to have a mercurial clone, otherwise the "tests" directory will not exist), follow this procedure (all lines prefixed with # are comments):

cd /tmp
sudo apt-get install php5-dev php-pear
pecl bundle xhprof
cd xhprof

# Here you will have to apply the patch mentioned here: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61674 to your extension/xhprof.c file (otherwise it won't compile

If you happen to develop large sites in Drupal, you might fall upon a case like this one, where different servers (namely at least one reverse proxy and one web server) interact, causing a series of chain reactions every time you change something. It might be frustrating, at times, to try and boost a coordinated system like this, and end up getting your users frustrated because part of it doen't work, when the rest (the part that *does* work) is super-fast.

Just as a self reminder, and because I don't fancy too much looking into the Drupal core for debugging, here is a short explanation of how the Drupal 7 bootstrap mechanism works. First of all, a bootstrap mechanism is a mechanism by which you work progressively your way through the full loading of a system, step by step, starting with the loading of simple elements that will allow you to load more complex elements. The Linux system also has a bootstrap mechanism (as do most OSes).

Just as a self reminder, this blog post explains why php-cgi might hang/stop silently when your load increases, and how to fix it, where it explains (in short) that fast-cgi should have the parameter PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS should equal 1000 or more (this can be done in /etc/default/php-fastcgi on my Ubuntu server).   Also worth a look is this page which has nothing to do with fast-cgi but describes how to increase th

Due to a licensing issue, the PHP bindings for Xapian were removed from Debian Squeeze.

Edit: as of July 2014, there is a recent article discussing the use of php5-memcache instead of php5-memcache to store sessions on this blog. There are many posts around on the web about using memcached to store sessions data on high-availability servers, but few actually cover the whole topic and there are some elements that I thought might be of interest in the form of a quick recap. Memcached allows you to store frequently-used data in memory (RAM).

For some reason I find myself having to work with CentOS a lot these days. I hate to say I hate something, but I can't help saying I don't like CentOS at all.

This command is to be improved progressively... sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql php5-xcache php5-gd php5-xdebug screen phpmyadmin php5-imagick mercurial git php-pear php5-dev

There's a short but great article about setting up PHPEclipse with Xdebug here: http://bogdan-albei.blogspot.com/2010/06/php-remote-debugging-with-xdebug-and.html I really don't want to forget this one!