From the 'Speed Boost' files:

It's a busy week for PHP developers with Zendcon going on. Among all the big corporate type news from Zend the other day, was a really interesting tidbit dropped by Zend CEO Andi Gutmans.

Gutmans stated during his keynote that his firm has been spending a lot of time working on the Zend Engine which is the core kernel in PHP. Part of the effort has been working on getting better optimization for PHP on x86 chips working with Intel compilers.

"We've managed to lower the memory footprint by up to 35 percent," Gutmans said. "It will be part of a future version of PHP."

That is huge.

According to Zend CTO Zeev Suraski, the memory improvement could be landing in the upcoming PHP 5.4 release. The improved memory footprint of PHP has performance implications that could serve as a massive boost for web apps that use PHP.

As to when, PHP users and developers should expect to see PHP 5.4 -- I learned a long time ago that PHP feature releases follow their own organic schedule, but I'm personally hopefully that it will see the light of day sooner rather than later.