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Simple PHP Timer

August 9, 2010

I was just trying to profile an HTML page for performance bottle-necks. I’m trying to follow a top-down approach, wherein I start from the entry script, and find the block of code that takes the biggest chunk of time before digging deeper into that chunk. At this stage, it’s not feasible to drop in a full-blown profiling tool like xdebug because of the set-up overhead and amount of data it generates.

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PHP vs. Python for Web Apps

July 28, 2010

These days, more and more people ask the Python vs. PHP question when they start out with a web application from scratch. I’ve developed PHP applications for 5 years but for the last couple of years I’ve been doing Python. This post is meant to note some of my observations. If you don’t want to read the whole of it, my opinion — opinion — is to stick with PHP for dishing out your *ML.

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MySQLdb Leaks Memory

June 30, 2010

Whenever people search for a Python library for MySQL, they get directed to MySQL for Python. However, there are some nasties hidden in it. Searching for “mysql python memory leaks” results in a few links which suggest that using Unicode causes memory leaks with the library. Today, however, I found another cause for MySQLdb memory leaks, while debugging a leaky Python daemon at work — database errors. Use this script:

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{Browse ‘Hello World!’}

June 18, 2010

That snippet of Oz somehow felt like an appropriate title for the first post on my tech blog. Expect something new here once in a while. Happy hacking! 🙂

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Technology

Tahir Hashmi