Talking Garbage Collection with Derick Rethans

10/29/19 • 25 min

Thanks to PHP being an interpreted language and it that it has a garbage collector, PHP developers don't often have to think about memory management. Unlike developers in compiled languages, such as C/C++, we don't have to give that much thought to memory allocation and deallocation.

However, it's helpful to have a broad understanding of how garbage collection works in PHP, along with how you can interact with it so that you can create high performing applications.

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Derick Rethans about:

The basics of how garbage collection works in PHP
About how Xdebug and garbage collection in PHP came about
About some of the functions available for interacting with it
How to get the most out of garbage collection

Links

Guests: Derick Rethans.
Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei, and Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performant and scalable PHP applications, email [email protected].

This podcast is produced by Tideways. Don't look further for an all in one Monitoring, Profiling and Exception Tracking software for PHP applications available on tideways.com. Follow us on Twitter (@tidewaysio). Find out more about us at https://tideways.com.

However, it's helpful to have a broad understanding of how garbage collection works in PHP, along with how you can interact with it so that you can create high performing applications.

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Derick Rethans about:

The basics of how garbage collection works in PHP
About how Xdebug and garbage collection in PHP came about
About some of the functions available for interacting with it
How to get the most out of garbage collection

Links

Guests: Derick Rethans.
Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei, and Matthew Setter.

Previous Episode

Introducing the Undercover ElePHPant

Welcome to the introductory episode of The Undercover ElePHPant.
This is the welcome episode, where we give you the rundown on what the podcast is about, who we, your lovely podcast hosts, are and what you can expect to hear.

So, let's get started.
This podcast aims to do three, core, things:

Uncover details and secrets of scaling PHP and how to maximise its performance.
Discuss different strategies to deploy PHP applications and scripts in production.
Provide helpful tips and tricks to keeping a PHP app running smoothly.

Now, for a little bit about us, your hosts.

Benjamin: I am Benjamin, I contributed to Doctrine and Symfony over the years and have started contributing to PHP and specifically the DOM extension. I am also deeply interested in everything related to PHP performance, scaling, and operations, which is why I founded Tideways - a software for monitoring, profiling and exception tracking PHP applications. This is also why i wanted to start this podcast with Matthew.

Matthew: I'm an independent software engineer and systems administrator, with a passion for performance and security. I've been developing web-based software and administering Linux servers since around 1999.

Benjamin: In season one, we'll have ten episodes, covering, ten different topics with guests who are extremely knowledgeable on each subject. We're planning to talk about garbage collection, profiling, background processes, shared-nothing architecture, timeouts, limits, and retries — and a lot more.

That’s a pretty broad range of topics, so we’re confident there'll be something for you, no matter your skill level or what you’re working on at the moment.

Matthew: We're planning to launch at the end of October, but we don't have a firm launch date as yet. However, if you subscribe to the podcast at undercover-elephpant.com, and follow us on Twitter, we’re @Undercover_PHP (https://undercover-elephpant.com), you'll know when the first episode's about to drop.

If you're interested in all these topics, in increasing the performance of your PHP applications, then join us from the end of October, for The Undercover ElePHPant.

Next Episode

PHP Performance with Marco Pivetta (ocramius)

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Marco Pivetta (ocramius) about:

PHP 7.4's new preloading feature: what it is, how it works, the benefits and drawbacks of using it
The speed differences between different versions of PHP (especially in 7.x)
The difference between OPcache and Preloading
How Composer's autoloader may soon be a thing of the past

Notable Quotes

Composer is the mother of all frameworks.The (Composer) autoloader will gradually disappear.You wouldn't build a house and not check it for 10 years. It should be the same for software projects.Everything (in software development) is a trade-off.

Links

Guests: Marco Pivetta.
Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei, and Matthew Setter.