Correcting himself from some previous comments concerning PHP 5 versus PHP 4 usage among developers, Marco Tabini has posted something new to his blog with some updated stats.

In the past, I have not been shy about sharing my opinion that the impending death of PHP 4 would have wreaked all sorts of havoc over the PHP world. I am glad to say that I've been wrong - dead wrong, in fact - and that I have never been as happy to be so far off the mark before.

According to a readers survey that the php|architect magazine ran (about a year ago even) PHP 5 is stronger than ever, taking up well over sixty percent of the usage with only a small part still hanging with PHP 4. Check out his graph for the full rankings.

Damien Seguy has passed on the latest PHP statistics for October 2008 on the nexen.net site. Here's a few highlights:

• This was the last month of PHP 4 dominance
• PHP 5 tops PHP market share with 47.50% usage
• PHP 4.4.9's usage is moving even lower

The full stats (including graphs) can be found here and the evolution stats are here.

Damien Seguy has official published the PHP statistics for July 2008 to the Nexen.net website today. Here's a summary:

• PHP 5 reaches 40,63% of PHP market share
• PHP 5.2.6 usage is growing fast, about to take over PHP 5.2.5
• PHP 4.4.9 and 5.2.6 will threaten PHP 4.4.8's dominance in August 2008

You can find the evolution stats for this past month here and the full statistics here.

The PHP.net website has a note posted about the restructuring of the manual

A few weeks ago the manual was restructured to improve navigation and make room for per-extension chapters and usage examples along with improved documentation for object oriented extensions.

Changes were made in the function reference and in the predefined variables and context options/parameters sections as well as information on upcoming features like namespaces, late static bindings and Phar (to be included in PHP 5.3). The manual is now covered by the CreativeCommons Attribution license.

Doug Brown has posted a new entry to his blog about how the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework has saved him some money.

He and his site were taken offline by his own hosting company because of one little detail - the limit on usage for the shared server was 3% and his site was using 30%. Going through his logs, he found the culprit - a "too many connections" message from MySQL due to the number of requests.

I'll admit, I was in a huge hurry to get this project done, so I wasn't thinking about the long term effects. Needless to say, I wasn't caching my MySQL query results. I know, tisk tisk.

He added a new private method to his class (using Zend_Cache to store the date) and dropped the call into his controller to pulled the cached info whenever it needed it.

In this quick post to the ApacheLounge forum, Steffen shares some stats running PHP in two different methods of running PHP on Apache - mod_php and fastcgi.

With PHP as module after some time the memory usage of Apache is growing and growing up to ~800M.
With mod_fcgid is stays on a steady ~100M
PHP configuration: only with the extension php_mysql.dll and eaccelerator.dll

A graph of the statistics is also provided.

There's an interesting post Jeff Atwood has made to his blog about PHP - its lack of standards, the way the language is structured and why none of that matters when it comes to its popularity.

PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

He includes links to several other articles that follow the "PHP sucks" train of thought too, but he notes that none of that really matters - its the popularity of PHP, its use in major corporate and social networking applications that is seeming to help drive it even more for developers to pick up and learn as a first web language.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

Responses from the community:

• Stas on the PHP 10.0 blog

Posted to his blog, Dave Marshall has a tip that uses declare and a trick or two to check out the memory usage of your scripts.

As far as I know, there isn't any memory footprint profiling in Xdebug, I think there was at some point but they removed it because it was a little flaky. I like to monitor the memory usage within my scripts, and I've found this simple snippet can help.

The script defines a log_memory function that pushes the memory and time information into a session value. The register_tick_function method is used to add log_memory to the handler and its called over and over from inside his for loop.

Damien Seguy has posted the latest statistics for PHP's usage for the month of March 2008. Here's some of the highlights:

• There were no surprises, only data reinforcing already set trends
• PHP 5 now make up over a third of all PHP installations to date
• More installations moved up to PHP versions 5.2.5 and 4.4.8
• Apache has almost reached 70% of the web server market share

You can check out the full details on this month's stats page including the evolution stats over on Nexen.net.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.