I will be speaking again this year at PHP Quebec conference, which has now been renamed to Confoo and covers many more topics then just PHP, which should make things even more interesting. With over 100 talks things looks to be an amazing conference, my own talk with cover PHP 5.3 awesomeness ;-)

If you are using PHP, chances are that at some point you needed to serialize PHP data, whether it was transparently done for you inside the PHP's session handler or directly so that complex PHP data types (objects & arrays) could be stored in DB or files, most people have done this. The default way of doing it is via a native PHP serializer, which creates a clear-text version of the data, which if you are serializing a fair bit of information ends up being rather verbose (read: BIG). This means that you end up having to store more data in memory, read more data from disk, etc... all of which slow down your application. As I was reading docs on Andrei's new memcache extension (memcached) I came across a binary serialization extension called Igbinary written by Sulake Dynamoid Oy. This extension promised much more optimal serialization routines by using binary, rather then a clear text format. Sounded, good so I decided to run a few benchmarks on it. For my tests I simply grabbed a whole pile of our...

My slides from the "APC & Memcache the High Performance Duo" talk are now online and can be found here. In the slide I mentioned that memcache is available of *NIX only, which thanks to at least two attendees I know to be incorrect. It appears that there is a working (albeit old, circa 2006) memcache win32 version, which you can find here: http://jehiah.cz/projects/memcached-win32/ Once you install it, you'd need to compile memcache PHP extension on win32 and then you should be set.

The slides from my "Common Optimization Mistakes" talk are now up and can be found here.

The slides from my talk, introducing PHP 5.3 are now up and can be found here: Slides