A popular saying goes that Programmers are machines that turn caffeine into code.And sure enough, ask a random programmer when they do their best work and there’s a high chance they will admit to a lot of late nights. Some earlier, some later. A popular trend is to get up at 4am and get some work done before the day’s craziness begins. Others like going to bed at 4am.At the gist of all this is avoiding distractions. But you could just lock the door, what’s so special about the night?I think it boils down to three things: the maker’s schedule, the sleepy brain and br...

The proliferation of multicore CPUs and the inability of our learned CPU vendors to squeeze many more GHz into their designs means that often the only way to get additional performance is by writing clever parallel software. One problem we were having is that some of our batch processing jobs were taking too long to run. In order to speed the processing, we tried to split the processing file into half, and let a separate PHP process run each job. Given that we were using a dual core server, each process would be able to run close to full speed (subject to I/O constraints).Here is our technique...