Upgrading to PHP 5.2.5 on RHEL and CentOS
November 16, 2007 by Jason · 141 Comments
After a little more than 2 months of waiting since the last release, PHP has been updated once again, this time to 5.2.5. The 5.2.5 release brings several security enhancements, more than 60 bug fixes, and improved performance for those of you that like arrays (and really, who doesn't?).
PHP 5.2.5 also updated the bundled version of PCRE to 7.3, although if you're a user of my repository you've been using that version for quite some time now, and the timezone database to 2007.9.
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XCache Plugin for WordPress
November 7, 2007 by Jason · 26 Comments
I was sitting here the other day saying to myself, you know, wouldn't it be nice if I could use the Var cache in XCache to eliminate some of the (far too numerous) queries used by WordPress? Well, I set myself on building a plugin to do just that, but it turns out that someone else actually already did it!
Now, before I go any further I should mention that this isn't actually a plugin, it's more of an extension of existing functionality. It doesn't go in your 'wp-content/plugins' folder (that was the first mistake I made, I never read the directions), it doesn't show up in your plugins list (making you check manually for updates, even under WordPress 2.3), and it doesn't have a pretty GUI in 'wp-admin'.
What it does do is eliminate a number of common queries that get run over and over for every single page view. On this site it eliminated a total of 8 queries per page load. While that only dropped the page generation time by about 0.1 seconds, every little bit counts.