Odin Assemble meet Media Temple Grid-Server

If the idea of the new Media Temple Grid-Server tickled your fancy you can rest assured you are not alone. We were so intrigued by the idea that we wanted to test Odin Assemble on the platform immediately. The results are in folks and I'm happy to share Odin Assemble is 100% compatible with the new Grid-Server product.

Migrating to PHP5

Here is some interesting reading from IBM to help you with your PHP4 to PHP5 migrations. Odin Assemble is still PHP4 but the porting has already begun.

More interesting PHP reading

This time the reading comes not from IBM but rather from Oracle.

Interesting PHP Reading

While I'm a bit behind in mentioning this (better late then never) I wish to share an interesing bit of PHP reading from IBM. At Odin we love PHP and while a lot of attention is being directed towards Ruby we feel motivated to share anything (and everything) PHP oriented.

Box.net Flucations

We've been expierencing connectivity issues with Box.net as of late. If this continues we may have to remove our box.net backup support.

The Amazon S3 system at just 15 cents per gigabyte is looking like an interesting alternative thanks to some great work by Christopher Shephard.

Interesting SEO Reading

This great SEO post compiles 21 great tips from Matt Cutts.

Real world performance

I recently noticed an interesting post from the TRYNT guys. According to this entry they've been on the recieving end of a lot of traffic thanks to popurls.com (and from what we can see Waxy.org as well).

At the time of this entry TRYNT has an Alexa ranking of 16,207 (it is very peaky though) and Odin Assemble is handling the load in stride.

PEAR Cache_Lite vs the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) Wrap-up

While it does appear that the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is faster then PEAR Cache_Lite, it is only marginally faster. After comparing a total of 3,000 unique cache write and cache reads APC was only 0.0003 seconds faster.

Since APC is not bundled with PHP and it generally requires additional installation and configuration steps it doesn't seem to be well matched for Odin Assemble.

We'd love to hear any insights you may have from personal expierence with APC. Let us know your thoughts!

PEAR Cache_Lite vs the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) Result Table

	1	2	3	4	5
PCL Read:	0.5118411300	0.5102628500	0.5147700500	0.5012261300	0.4773143600
PCL Write:	0.5111108700	0.5095709800	0.5140931700	0.5027453900	0.4762868400
APC Read:	0.5121711900	0.5103664100	0.5148693000	0.4986618800	0.4776502900
APC Write:	0.5113126400	0.5097728000	0.5142979700	0.5002530600	0.4765448900
Difference	0.0005318300	0.0003053800	0.0003040500	0.0050565800	0.0005939800
Winner	APC	APC	APC	PCL	APC

	6	7	8	9	10
PCL Read:	0.5068983600	0.4675680900	0.6671242200	0.5249346200	0.4250428500
PCL Write:	0.5054480600	0.4734905600	0.6692686400	0.5240863100	0.4241265900
APC Read:	0.5070073100	0.4676923600	0.6680336500	0.5252131100	0.4251422700
APC Write:	0.5063934600	0.4703554300	0.6696843400	0.5243528800	0.4245617800
Difference	0.0010543500	0.0030108600	0.0013251300	0.0005450600	0.0005346100
Winner	APC	PCL	APC	APC	APC

PCL:	1.0217210070
APC:	1.0214337020
Average Difference	0.0002873050

PEAR Cache_Lite vs the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) Results

To test PEAR Cache_Lite vs the Alternate PHP Cache (APC) we benchmarked the cache write and cache read speed of both products.

Using the source HTML of three websites* we ran 10 sets of 100 cache writes/reads.

Test 1

PCL Read:	0.51184113
PCL Write:	0.51111087
APC Read:	0.51217119
APC Write:	0.51131264

APC faster: 0.00053183 s difference

Test 2

l Read:	0.51026285
PCL Write:	0.50957098
APC Read:	0.51036641
APC Write:	0.5097728

APC faster: 0.00030538 s difference

Test 3

PCL Read:	0.51477005
PCL Write:	0.51409317
APC Read:	0.5148693
APC Write:	0.51429797

APC faster: 0.00030405 s difference

Test 4

PCL Read:	0.50122613
PCL Write:	0.50274539
APC Read:	0.49866188
APC Write:	0.50025306

PCL faster: 0.00505658 s difference

Test 5

PCL Read:	0.47731436
PCL Write:	0.47628684
APC Read:	0.47765029
APC Write:	0.47654489

APC faster: 0.00059398 s difference

Test 6

PCL Read:	0.50689836
PCL Write:	0.50544806
APC Read:	0.50700731
APC Write:	0.50639346

APC faster: 0.00105435 s difference

Test 7

PCL Read:	0.46756809
PCL Write:	0.47349056
APC Read:	0.46769236
APC Write:	0.47035543

PCL faster: 0.00301086 s difference

Test 8

PCL Read:	0.66712422
PCL Write:	0.66926864
APC Read:	0.66803365
APC Write:	0.66968434

APC faster: 0.00132513 s difference

Test 9

PCL Read:	0.52493462
PCL Write:	0.52408631
APC Read:	0.52521311
APC Write:	0.52435288

APC faster: 0.00054506 s difference

Test 10

PCL Read:	0.42504285
PCL Write:	0.42412659
APC Read:	0.42514227
APC Write:	0.42456178

APC faster: 0.00053461 s difference

* Yahoo, Yahoo Developer > PHP : Cache Yahoo! Web Service REST Calls and Google

Wikibooks Programming PHP

Wikibooks > Programming PHP is an interesting find by the TRYNT guys. They mentioned it yesterday at the TRYNT blog.

PEAR Cache_Lite vs the Alternative PHP Cache (APC)

While reading through the Yahoo Developers website I stumbled upon PHP : Cache Yahoo! Web Service REST Calls. This HOWTO uses the Alternate PHP Cache (APC) as its caching mechanism while Odin Assemble on the other hand uses PEAR Cache_Lite. This motivated us to do a little bit of benchmarking. If APC proves faster then we'll integrate support :).