PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 Released

daeg writes "PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 have been released with a plethora of security updates. Many of the security notifications come from the Month of PHP Bugs effort, and range from double freed memory to bugs in functions that allow attackers to enable register_globals, to memory corruption with unserialize(), to input validation flaws that allow e-mail header injections, with an unhealthy sprinkling of other bugs and flaws fixed. All administrators that run any version of PHP are encouraged to update immediately."

Comments

I want to see someone claim again

[suv4x4]

I want to see someone claim that the "month of bugs" projects harms the products involved. From what we saw with Apple and PHP, they finally closed holes gaping for many previous versions.

Now if only could PHP also fix their performance and inconsistencies..

Re:I want to see someone claim again

[suv4x4]

In PHP's defense, how does performance compare once some sort of accelerator is involved? Are those fancy output caching engines or do they actually precompile/cache the code or something like that?

When you run a PHP file, there are two stages of execution:
[build a parse tree from the source and output bytecodes] [interpret the bytecodes]

The accelerators cache the bytecodes, so next time they are loaded (usually from RAM) and interpreted directly.

However compare with what you get with the CLR by default:
[a compiler builds the parse tree and outputs bytecodes] [opcodes are compiled to machine code] [natively run machine code linked to a runtime library]

You basically never ever repeat the first step more than once there, and in some cases the second. And running as native code is hella faster. A big problem with PHP is it abuses string hashes and fails to do early binding where appropriate (indexed serial arrays, class objects and methods etc.).

So everything you reference in PHP requires a bunch of hash lookups. It's terrible.

Re:I want to see someone claim again

[digidave]

The raw speed of PHP isn't very relevant. It's a language for low to mid-range web apps that is flexible enough to do high-end web apps as well. If your PHP app is slow it's probably due to poor programming or poor database indexing or design. PHP usually takes request data, gathers a database result, shuffles around some data, then displays an HTML page. It's easily fast enough for its purpose.

There are plenty of good criticisms for PHP (and every other language), but performance is only a factor in PHP web apps when the programmers do really stupid things.

Re:I want to see someone claim again

[arodland]

For example, there were a number of bugs that required the attacker to be able to supply their own code. If the attacker can supply their own code, they can just call popen() or system() and dispense with all the hoopla required to compermise the worker and inject shellcode. Well actually... no.

PHP enjoys overwhelming popularity in shared-hosting environments, where you put a lot of users on one server, and the users supply the code, but you don't really trust the users. You don't want them to compromise other users' reliability, or break your server, or do anything very interesting... but you still have to let them run their code because that's what the service is. So PHP comes with all sorts of features to facilitate this... "safe mode" and the like. But if there are security issues all through PHP that poke holes in this security model, then you find yourself in a microsoft-esque situation where the security isn't real at all, and you're screwed. Not so pleasant.

Re:I want to see someone claim again

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

At first I thought you were trolling but from your "fix their performance" statement I realize you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Right. PHP's the fastest language out there, as proven in this test.

You're comparing two completely differnet language types. You might as well compare Java and C++.

Compared to other interpreted (e.g. parse tree is built on the fly rather than by a compiler) languages like Python or Ruby, PHP is about average.

Compare PHP to the CLR (or Mono) or to the JRE, and PHP is going to be way slower.

But calling PHP slow because of some benchmark is just bull. Yes, Java or .NET is faster, and if you're writing an application that does a lot of crunching, by all means you should use a platform that is good at it. There are plenty of good reasons to choose J2EE or ASP.NET over PHP, but performance just isn't one of them in a lot of applications.

The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia (the 10th most popular website in the world) with PHP and 123 commodity PC servers. What does that prove? It proves that application design and system architecture is FAR more important than what platform you choose. You can run benchmarks all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that Wikipedia does far more with far less than most websites out there - and they do it with PHP.

I serve over 10 million pageviews a month on WS Network using PHP, MySQL, and a virtual server with 50MB of memory, a fraction of a 2.4GHz P4, and 100MB of swap. My informal load testing indicates that I could handle as many as 30 pageviews per second (80 million per month) with my current hardware and DB setup.

Maybe I could do more with J2EE or ASP.NET (or, perhaps I could do far less - ASP.NET and J2EE aren't as easy on memory as PHP for small apps). But the fact is that I am doing a hell of a lot already considering the very limited hardware I'm running on.

PHP code execution performance is not, and has never been, a major issue in my experience. It's the same way with Python, Perl, Ruby, and any other "scripting" language. The fact is, you're not going to write an H.264 codec or a PS3 game in Python. But many, many applications are not constrained by CPU performance. 8-core servers are now cheap. 16-core servers will be soon. Changing your language might give you 10x better performance. But architecture and algorithm improvements will probably get you much, much more.

"Performance isn't a problem until it's a problem."

Bad release practices

[daeg]

I no longer use PHP, but these two releases highlight one of the things I hated the most about PHP. Every release, even minor "bugfix" releases (5.2.1 to 5.2.2) always do more than fix security and blocker bugs. That means that even if you're only updating to fix the mail() function, you have to run your entire site/system through testing to ensure the update didn't mysteriously break something else.

See, for example, the 4.6.6 release notes:

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.4.6. This release addresses a crash problem with the session extension when register_globals is turned on that was introduced in PHP 4.4.5. This release comes also with the new version 7.0 of PCRE and it addresses a number of minor bugs. That means that 4.4.5 introduced a major crash problem in a module every PHP website uses. How does that get missed? Also, why does that release also simultaneously bundle a new library version AND fix other "minor bugs"? Release the crash fix and that's it! Keep new features/minor bug fixes to point releases (4.5), not minor point versions.

Thank god Python doesn't do that. At least they keep all the big changes to individual versions!

Re:Bad release practices

[Ambush Commander]

What you're missing is that fact that PHP uses the three digit version numbering system to mean something slightly different than what you're used to. Increments in the 0.x.0 number indicate, besides major changes in the language, that extension compatibility was broken and thus they need to be recompiled (to see a great example of this, check PHP 4.4). 0.0.x releases do contain feature releases, but you don't have to worry about extensions breaking.

Firefox does the same thing too, except they end up stepping on extension authors feet when they increment the third version number! That's why they introduced a fourth number 0.0.0.x for memory leak / security fixes. But Firefox has the luxury of an auto-update system: something PHP doesn't have. It is in both sysadmin's and PHP's developer's best interests to not be releasing new versions every other week.

Re:You must be mistaken.

[MrMunkey]

I'm not sure if you had some /sarcasm there or not. I'll assume not and say that you're partly right.

I'm a PHP developer. I love PHP because I haven't come across anything that I can not do with it yet. Does that mean it's the best programming language ZOMG 3V3R! No. PHP is a pretty good general purpose web scripting language. Like all the other languages out there, it has bugs or features that haven't been implemented or thought of yet, and that's why there are version numbers.

PHP does suffer some of the same issues that C++ has suffered in the past, and they are due to the fundamental ideas of the project. PHP doesn't have a framework for you to do everything. I guess that mostly comes up with ASP and probably Ruby, but I'm a little under read on Ruby. Much like the C++ vs. Java debate, C++ makes you do things yourself (or at least you need to know about the community projects that make life easier... like smart pointers and the like). That's pretty much the same with PHP. You have the base functions, and there are extensions you can get to help, but MVC and other parts of frameworks are left for you to decide what you want or need for your project.

So, with that in mind, security is also left up to the developer. PHP 5.2.x has made a lot of great strides in helping out by introducing the Filter extension and others. If people do not filter/escape the input/output from their pages, they're just opening up a can of worms. I'm a firm believer in saying it's easier to filter yourself than undo a filter that the system did for you automatically.

PHP has its issues, but I don't think it would be as popular as it is if PHP didn't serve a purpose and do it somewhat well.

Examples of PHP inconsistency and performance

[Snover]

Sure, I'll give you some.

Inconsistent function naming (underscores):

substr_compare() vs.
strcmp()

More inconsistent function naming (verb location):

file_get_contents() vs.
get_html_translation_table()

Even within the same extension:

imagesetstyle() vs.
imagecolorset()

Flipped haystack and needle:

strpos(haystack, needle) vs.
in_array(needle, haystack)

Speed:

Scutigena Computer Language Performance Comparison (see graphs)
There used to be another site that you could compare one language's speed relative to another that also showed PHP as one of the slowest. I can't seem to find it now, though. Also PHP5 might compare a bit more favourably, but this is all I could find after a quick Google search. Perhaps more importantly, PHP drags the speed of other things down (like Apache), since even though the core is supposedly thread-safe, nobody seems to know which extensions are and aren't, so eg. Apache needs to be run in prefork mpm instead of using a threaded mpm.

I think PHP is overall a fairly decent language; I've used it for many years with great success. But it does have major problems, and it would be nice for them to get fixed instead of pushed aside. (I read some minutes from a PHP 6 meeting a while ago where they touched on the issue of consistency, and the PHP Group decided that it wasn't important enough to fix. It's really annoying to me to need a PHP-aware IDE or a manual always handy to program in a language because the arguments and function names are so non-uniform.)

Re:Examples of PHP inconsistency and performance

[jsebrech]

Perhaps more importantly, PHP drags the speed of other things down (like Apache), since even though the core is supposedly thread-safe, nobody seems to know which extensions are and aren't, so eg. Apache needs to be run in prefork mpm instead of using a threaded mpm.

This is my main beef with PHP. They have their head in the sand with regards to server configuration.

Case in point: the company I work for sells PHP-based service center and reservations systems to large companies. These companies generally have windows-based server infrastructures, so we have to deploy on windows/IIS. If you look at the suggested configuration for PHP on IIS in the PHP manual, you'll find this page, which explains regular CGI and ISAPI (multi-threaded) configurations. What the manual doesn't tell you is that neither of these configurations actually work in production environments. Regular CGI configurations are too slow (on windows), and ISAPI is too unreliable (customers that deployed with ISAPI configurations suffered daily server hangs).

The only viable configuration for production IIS servers, as it turns out, is FastCGI, which is not documented in PHP's manual section on IIS configuration. Their documentation actively misinforms people on how to configure PHP. That's bad.