Memory leak in xcache extension of PHP

I recently encountered memory leak while using the xcache extension (version 1.2) with PHP 5.2.6.

The following code confirms the memory leak:

$data = "data";
xcache_set("key",$data);
while(1) {
$a = xcache_get("key");
echo "Memory Usage :".memory_get_usage()."\n";
}

This seems like a known issue and a worksround is suggested by oli at http://xcache.lighttpd.net/ticket/95 . Simply type-cast the data to a string while using xcache_set. The following works without any memory leak:

$data = "data";
xcache_set("key",(string)$data);
while(1) {
$a = xcache_get("key");
echo "Memory Usage :".memory_get_usage()."\n";
}

Don't know the root cause of this issue but the workaround helped.

Browsers are getting faster!!

Google Chrome has raised the bar for browser speeds as far as rendering/javascript is concerned. Ever since it's launch, all other browsers are releasing newer and faster versions one by one.

I recently tried the following browsers:

1) Opera 9.64
2) Chrome 1.0
3) IE 8
4) Firefox 3.5
5) Safari 4

Apart from IE 8 (whose javascript processing is awful) all the browsers are amazingly fast compared to their predecessors. I use to think that browsing was slow mainly because of the internet speed but it seems that the browser rendering speed has a major role to play.

Firefox 3.5 version is beta as of now but the final release should be out soon. I kind of like Firefox because of the add-ons available with it. There's just about any kind of extension that you'd like.

If given an option where all these browsers perform almost at par in terms of speed (5% here or there does not really matter) i'd use Firefox.

Tagging pattern in an element of XML using PHP

Recently I had a requirement to tag a pattern within an element of the provided XML.

Following code worked:
<?php

function replaceElementWithTaggedElement($doc, $element, $pattern, $tagNameForPattern)
{
$newElement = $doc->appendChild(new domelement($element->nodeName));

$content = $element->nodeValue;
while(preg_match($pattern, $content, $matches, PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE))
{
$match = $matches[0][0];
$offset = $matches[0][1];
$firstPart = substr($content,0,$offset);
$secondPart = substr($content,$offset+strlen($match));
$newElement->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($firstPart));

$taggedElement = $doc->createElement($tagNameForPattern);
$taggedElement->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($match));
$newElement->appendChild($taggedElement);

$content = $secondPart;
}
$newElement->appendChild($doc->createTextNode($content));

$element->parentNode->replaceChild($newElement, $element);
}

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML("<root><one>This is the first text node</one><two>This is the second text node and the word to be highlighted is second</two></root>");
$oldElement = $doc->getElementsByTagName("two")->item(0);

replaceElementWithTaggedElement($doc, $oldElement, "/second/", "tagged");

echo $doc->saveXML();
?>

OUTPUT

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root><one>This is the first text node</one><two>This is the <tagged>second</tagged> text node and the word to be highlighted is <tagged>second</tagged></two></root>