On PHP and cache slams and solutions

While reading about Doctrine's cache mechanism (which applies to other stuff than database queries, by the way), my eye was caught by a little message at the end (last section) about cache slams. I have used cache mechanisms extensively over the last few years, but (maybe luckily) never happened to witness a "cache slam". There's a link to a blog (by an unnamed author) that explains that. To make it short, you can have race conditions in APC (and

PHP's @ hurts performance

Did you know...? As a "take away" information taken from this post https://gist.github.com/nikic/6699370 (by famous PHP core developer @nikita_ppv), it appears like the @ sign in PHP (used to "hide" errors, as the "error-suppression operator" it is) also disables the "compiled variables" optimization (OpCode caching).

SSL certificates for multiple virtual hosts: problem on IE for Windows XP

Using a single server for multiple virtual hosts is something that comes naturally nowadays for any web server sysadmin. Using SSL certificates is also common (particularly so since the infamous Blacksheep extension for Firefox as published a few years back). However, the mixing of SSL and virtual hosts might not be as easy as you might think.

Gallery 2.3 not translating

Just in case you would fall upon this issue as well, Gallery2 requires the corresponding language-specific locales to be installed on the system (it depends on them to show the matching translated terms). The code to do that (and to debug it) is located (in Gallery 2.3) on line 330 of modules/core/classs/GalleryTranslator.class. We hope it helps you a little.

Nginx + CDN + GoogleBot or how to avoid many useless Googlebot hits

If you're like me and you've developed a CDN distribution for your website's content (while waiting for SPDY to be widely adopted and available in mainstream distributions), you might have noted that the Googlebot is frequently scanning your CDNs, and this might have made your website a bit overloaded. After all, the goal of the CDNs are (several but in my case only) to elegantly distribute contents across subdomains so your browser will load the page resources faster (otherwise it gets blocked by the HTTP limit or any higher limit set by your browser of simultaneous content download). Hell,