Google Speed Tips Get Picked Apart

Re:Google Speed Tips Get Picked Apart by chaosmachine on Thursday June 25, 2009 @04:53PM (#674361)

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought those PHP tips were more than a little suspect...

  GOOD: echo $_POST['description'];

That really should not have made it past their editorial process.

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Re:Google Speed Tips Get Picked Apart by smokinn on Thursday June 25, 2009 @08:47PM (#674720)

That example was particularly egregious. PHP uses copy-on-write so the temp variable held a pointer to the 500k of data they mentioned, not a copy.

Had they concatenated a small string to the end then PHP wouldn't copied the data and used the MB of memory they alluded to.

That whole document was half baked at best.

EDIT: I went to look at the document to reference the example and noticed that they changed their example. It used to be:

$description = $_POST['description'];

echo $description;

And now it's:

In the following example, imagine if a malicious user had inserted 512KB worth of characters into a textarea field. This would result in 1MB of memory being used!

$description = strip_tags($_POST['description']);

echo $description;

There's no reason to copy the variable above, you can simply do this operation inline and avoid the extra memory consumption:

echo strip_tags($_POST['description']);

So someone is definitely working on making the examples at least match the description.

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