Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

Why Taxes May Double

From http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/04/david-walker-why-.html:

Unless we begin to get our fiscal house in order, there's simply no other way to handle our ever-mounting debt burdens except by doubling taxes over time. Otherwise, our growing commitments for Medicare and Social Security benefits will gradually squeeze out spending on other vital programs such as education, research and development, and infrastructure.

Another great line: "...additional accumulations of debt are, absent dramatic reductions in the size and role of government, basically deferred tax increases."

Memphis Tea Party: Success!

I was part of the organizing committee for yesterday's Tax Day Tea Party here in Memphis. That sounds kind of formal; it was just a bunch of folks who found each other on the internet and (with some amount of arguing, mostly from me ;-) got an event put together. Talk about an emergent phenomenon.

I can only call it a resounding success. We had at least 4000 (yes, four thousand or more) people in attendance, according to the professional sound crews in attendance and media folk who were on site. You'd be hard pressed to discover that from newspapers or television reporting today.

We're not the only ones who had high attendance; see more here http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/76810/ and elsewhere.

My duties kept me from actually watching any of the speakers. I helped direct traffic for 3 hours to get people safely in and out, with three other guys handling the arrangement of parking everyone on the grass (the lot overflowed immediately). That 4000 number seems pretty likely to me, given the traffic.

If you are interested in the Memphis Tea Party, take a look at thememphisteaparty.com website, or our Facebook group page, or contact me directly if you like.

I expect at some point I will write more about this. There's more to it than I'm hearing about on the news, for sure. One wonders how far it can go.

UPDATE: Oh, and the Facebook page for the Tax Day event itself is here.

UPDATE 2: Some of the Facebook albums:

Solar_Mind_Read

Given yesterday's news that Honda can now connect thoughts to robotic actuators, we have been given permission to talk about the Solar PHP implementation of that interface: Solar_Mind_Read.

<?php
class Solar_Mind_Read extends Solar_Base {

    protected $_Solar_Mind_Read = array(
        'mind' => null,
    );

    protected $_mind;

    public function __construct($config = null)
    {
        parent::__construct($config);

        $this->_mind = Solar::dependency(
            'Honda_Thought_Interface',
            $this->_config['mind']
        );
    }

    public function fetchIntent($search)
    {
        return $this->_mind->recall($search);
    }

    public function doWhatIMean($subject, $callback)
    {
        $intent = $this->fetchIntent($subject);
        return call_user_func($callback, $intent);
    }

    public function fetchPhpCode($task)
    {
        throw $this->_exception('ERR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED', array(
            'task' => $task,
        ));
    }
}
?>

As you can see, we leverage Solar's base class and inherited configuration, along with its existing dependency injection functionality, to receive an existing Honda "thought" object at construction time. We can then see what the user's intent is given a particular subject using the fetchIntent() method.

Even better, we can pass a callback to the doWhatIMean() method. This means that the user will always get what he wants, not merely what he asks for.

Finally, as a developer tool, the fetchPhpCode() method will take a task description and generate PHP code for it. We are waiting on a related patch to the PHP RunKit extension for this to be fully implemented. In the mean time, the automatic exception system finds the right exception class and throws it, with localized translation, and information about the task.

Once Solar_Mind_Read is complete, we believe we will be able to move on to Solar_Mind_Write. Together, these tools should help the developer with convincing his clients that what they really need is something that's easier to implement, and then with actually implementing it.

Thanks for your attention; we hope this April Fool's Day article piques your interest in the power of the Solar Framework for PHP 5. Many thanks to Clay Loveless for the subject idea. :-)

A Siege On Benchmarks

My regular readers (and perhaps the irregular ones as well ;-) know that I have been obsessed with baseline-responsiveness benchmarking of frameworks for years now.  The idea has always been that, in order to know how far you can optimize your framework-based applications, you need to know the limits imposed by the framework itself.  Only then can you have an idea of where to spend your limited resources on improvement.  For example, if you need 200 dynamic requests/second, but the framework itself (with no application code in use) is capable only of 100, then you know that no amount of application or database optimization will help you -- it's time to start scaling, either horizontally or vertically.

To perform these benchmarks, I have only employed the ab tool provided by the Apache web server.  It was easy to use, and relatively easy to parse the output to automate reporting.  However, it turns out that ab over-reports responsiveness of Apache when serving static HTML files, and when serving minimal PHP scripts such as <?php echo "hello world"; ?>.  I discovered this just recently when attempting to find out why PHP appeared to be faster than HTML, and then only with the assistance of Paul Reinheimer, whom I now owe a bottle of vodka for his trouble.  ;-)

It turns out that the siege tool from JoeDog Software is more accurate in reporting static HTML and PHP responsiveness.  This is confirmed through Paul Reinheimer as well, who reported the expected responsiveness on other systems.

The over-reporting from ab means that all my previous reporting on benchmarks is skewed too low when comparing framework responsiveness to PHP's maximum responsiveness.  As such, I have re-run all the previously published benchmarks using siege instead of ab.  Previous runs with ab are here ...

... and below are the updated siege versions.  As with previous attempts, these benchmarks are performed on an Amazon EC2 "small" instance.  There is one difference to note: previous runs used Xcache for bytecode caching, but these use APC; I don't suspect this change in caching engines has a significant effect, but I have not tested that assertion.

framework rel avg
baseline-html 1.1878 985.69
baseline-php 1.0000 829.82
cake-1.1.10 0.0938 77.84
cake-1.1.11 0.1277 105.96
cake-1.1.12 0.1288 106.84
cake-1.1.16 0.1166 96.77
cake-1.1.17 0.1165 96.70
cake-1.1.19 0.1298 107.69
cake-1.2.0-rc2 0.0516 42.79
solar-0.25.0 0.1852 153.66
solar-0.26.0 0.1789 148.43
solar-0.27.0 0.1734 143.93
solar-0.28.0 0.1671 138.64
solar-1.0.0alpha1 0.1706 141.58
symfony-0.6.3 0.0629 52.22
symfony-1.0.0beta2 0.0758 62.91
symfony-1.0.6 0.0746 61.91
symfony-1.0.6-dw 0.0820 68.03
symfony-1.0.6-fp 0.0853 70.78
symfony-1.0.17 0.0744 61.73
symfony-1.1.0 0.0745 61.84
zend-0.2.0 0.2176 180.56
zend-0.6.0 0.1998 165.78
zend-1.0.0 0.1268 105.25
zend-1.0.1 0.1263 104.80
zend-1.5.2 0.0951 78.93

Note the baseline-html and baseline-php numbers.  Using ab previously, these were reported as 2100-2400 requests/second and 1100-1400 requests/second, respectively.  The siege tool reports a much lower number for both, but the dropoff between static HTML and dynamic PHP is much smaller; with ab it looked like about 40-50%, but now with siege it looks like only about 15-18%.  This behavior is much more like what we would expect from a memory-based PHP script.

Note also the separate framework requests/second; they are very similar between ab and siege.  This means that the framework responsiveness numbers are almost unchanged.

Because the nearly-identical framework numbers are compared to a much smaller baseline PHP number, the frameworks now appear to be doing much better in relation to PHP's maximum responsiveness.  For example, Solar-1.0.0alpha1 with ab appeared to run at about 11% of PHP's max, but with siege it looks close to 17%.  All of the frameworks tested see this kind of comparative gain in their reporting.

However, when compared to each other, the framework rankings are the same as before:  Solar has the highest baseline responsiveness, followed by Cake and Zend (their respective releases are very close to each other in responsiveness), and Symfony trails with the lowest baseline responsiveness.

In summary, using ab skewed the "percentage of PHP" comparisons because it over-reported PHP's maximum responsiveness, but the framework requests/second numbers and the framework comparative rankings are unchanged from previous reporting.  The Google project for the benchmarking system has been updated to use siege, so all future reporting will reflect its results, not those of ab.

Lazyweb Request: Why would PHP be *faster* than HTML?

With the help of the great guys at Slicehost.com, I am attempting to run my benchmark series on a virtual private server, to compare with EC2. However, I'm seeing a very strange result for the baselines: a PHP page delivers more requests-per-second than a static HTML page.

The OS is a stock Ubuntu 8.10 installation; you can see the setup steps here.

The virtual private server has 2 gigs of RAM, and is on a box by itself, so there is no other external activity to skew the results.

I ran ab -c 10 -t 60 http://localhost/ on each of two files: index.html, which has only the static text "hello world"; and index.php, which has only the code <?php echo 'hello world'; ?>.

Here are the results without APC, averaged over 5 one-minute runs:


index.html : 7067.57 req/sec
index.php  : 7484.57 req/sec # faster???

Here are the results with APC, averaged over 5 one-minute runs:


index.html : 7013.50 req/sec
index.php  : 8041.06 req/sec # faster???

I haven't seen this behavior on EC2. I'm not complaining, but it does seem unintuitive; invoking the PHP interpreter should be more expensive than just delivering a static HTML file. Does anyone have ideas as to why this might be happening?

UPDATE: With the help of Paul Reinheimer, we appear to have found the culprit: the ab tool itself seems to be at fault. Running similar tests by hand with siege returns much more reasonable and expected numbers (~4000 req/sec for HTML, ~3200 for PHP). I'm going to re-work the test scripts to use siege later and report back. Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions, and special thanks to Paul Reinheimer for working through it with me today.

Fundamental Error in the So-Called "Stimulus" Approach

Congressmen, Senators, the President, and all the high advisors feel that "we need to do something!" about the current economic crisis. Leave aside that government action is at least 50% the reason we got into this mess (I'd rate it closer to 80%). These guys are succumbing to a major critical-thinking error:

1. We must do something!

2. This (the so-called "stimulus" package) is something.

3. Therefore, we must do this.

Merely that it's something to do doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I'd rather seem them subscribe to this: "Don't just do something -- stand there!" Government doing *nothing* is almost always much better than government doing *anything*.

Say "No" To Smarty!

I just discovered nosmarty.net in my Solar referrer logs. I have little love for Smarty, so it's nice to see this:

First released in January 2001, Smarty has become a stagnant, bug-ridden mess--and also the most popular PHP templating engine in use today. But it shouldn't be. No Smarty was created to warn developers about its use and encourage the use of superior alternatives.

Hey guys, you might want to add Savant to your list of PHP5 alternatives. Aside from that, great site!

UPDATE: To those who think my tone is inappropriate -- "I'm not disrespectful, I'm just ahead of the curve." </joker> ;-)

UPDATE (Thu 05 Jan): Please note that I am not affiliated with nosmarty.net in any way. I just saw it in my referrer logs and linked to it in this post. Thank, Ivo Jansch, for pointing out the need for clarity here.

UPDATE (Thu 05 Jan 10:56): A commenter below opines "If Smarty is used in the right manner, I don't see why it can't have it's place within the arsenal of tools for developers to use." I respond that there *is* no right manner in which to use Smarty; it's solving the wrong problem. I expound on that here:

You may have heard that you need to keep your PHP and HTML separated, but that’s not quite the case. Instead, what you need is to keep your "business logic" separate from your "presentation logic", and that’s a different thing entirely.

Thus, all that’s required is a way to keep your views and controllers separated, and perhaps provide helpers for common view tasks. Then you can use plain PHP in your view scripts (templates), without needing a whole new language.

Updated "Getting Started" Docs for Solar

In a long, long overdue move, I have updated the old "Getting Started" docs for Solar.

  1. First Run (how to download and install a Solar system)
  2. First Vendor (creating your own workspace in the system)
  3. First Basic App (short CLI command to create app class files)
  4. First Model (short CLI command to create model class files)
  5. First Model App (short CLI command build a BREAD app based on a model)

My apologies to everyone who hit the brick wall of the bad old docs; their continued existence was nobody's fault but mine. Special thanks go out to Anthony Gentile at OmniTI, whose experience with the previous documentation embarrassed me into writing these new, much easier getting-started guides.