Debuggable Ltd. The Company for all things Debuggable

Hey folks,

I think this could be interesting for a lot of you running PHP 5.2.1 in a production environment. While I was at php|works I heard a lot of people say how bad of a release 5.2.1 was and that I should stay away from it. Well I didn't take it to seriously at this point, but when I checked what version of PHP we are running on my client project recently it turns out it was 5.2.1.

At this point we still had significant performance issues with our application (300db tables are fun!) so I suggested Dennis (the project manager) to see if we can upgrade to the latest PHP release. I just talked with him again and was amazed. The upgrade from PHP 5.2.1 to 5.2.4 seems to have given us a 40-60% performance boost in terms of our CPU usage having dropped from being constantly at 100% down to around those values.

So if you have an application in production which struggles with performance issues, check if its running 5.2.1 - you may have a very cheap optimization option available ; ).

HTH,
-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: While there have been several bug fixes and improvements in between 5.2.1 and 5.2.4, this bug seems to have caused the biggest issues.