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A couple months ago, a troubled user reported that his system was outputting the dreaded “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of ######## bytes exhausted” in his forum’s member area, even when viewing just a public profile.  Investigating, I found that on his system PHP was gobbling up an insane amount of memory when including our theme files.  Now, the theme files for the Member and Discussion Forum modules are basically a number of class methods that have HTML and ExpressionEngine variables stored in what is known as Heredoc strings.  Heredoc is a string format we often use to store HTML as it does not require that we escape single or double quotes in its content.  Any PHP developer will tell you that escaping quotes is one of the banes of their existence.

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Which brings up a question regarding EngineHosting: Last time I checked the official website it lists the PHP version as being 4.3.9. Any idea when EngineHosting will make the move to PHP5? Just curious.

Soon. 

The base code included and supported with bug and security back-porting by Redhat Enterprise Linux v4 is php 4.3.9 and MySQL 4.1.20, and actually is fully supported by them for a few more years into the future.  Redhat Enterprise Linux v5 was released about 6 months ago, and while internal testing had cleared for Redhat Enterprise v5 for use on our database servers, and some are actually running it now, as are some of our dedicated server clients that had specific project needs for earlier roll out.

That said, we had not until recently finish out testing to see if there were any implications with moving to apache 2.2.x/php 5.1.6 and MySQL 5.0.22 which are the base code versions in Redhat Enterprise v5.  This includes our internal processes for management, configuration, optimization, and monitoring systems, along with a number of other areas of focus. 

As we only run php as a apache module, we also needed to have clusters of servers in place to setup new clients on, and allow the easy migration of existing clients that have a need/desire to migrate to php 5 sooner rather than later.  This includes the ability to migrate them back to the php 4 based cluster in the event they find something they are running does not work well under php 5 for any reason.

All of this is almost completed and in place so we will make an announcement soon on the availability of php 5/mysql 5 on our web server clusters. 

We are always more worried about stability, performance and security then anything else, so we take extra steps most don’t before implementing upgrades that may impact clients in any way.  This is liked by many clients and loved by our larger enterprise/government and educational clients as you can imagine 😊

As always if you have questions like this please feel free to drop a note to EngineHosting.com staff as we will know better then the ExpressionEngine staff on our projects and time frames. 😊

Thanks!

Coolness. That’s all I needed to know. Was just wondering. 😉

Very cool indeed.
Maybe I can start to take those O’Reilly “Learning PHP5” books off my shelf and actually have a go at it 😊