Xaprb

PHP has no built-in debugger.

This is HUGE. The ability to say perl -d .... and have a fully featured, gdb-like debugger at your command, with absolutely nothing to download or install, is HUGE.

Debugging PHP is an epic pain in the best of circumstances, and it’s all but impossible on a system you don’t control and can’t waste a bunch of time on even if you had permission to install things.

If I’m wrong, please correct me!

I’ve been working with a client recently who has SELinux on his servers.  It has been quite a struggle sometimes.

My colleages tell me that SELinux has a pretty noticeable performance impact.  I am not sure if we have benchmarks to support this; at any rate, the client said it’s OK, we’ll take the performance hit.

There have been a few problems (Nagios can’t run because it can’t write to its own pid file, etc etc).  Last night there was something new: “too many connections” when trying to connect to MySQL.  As a result the site was down, and it wasn’t possible to log in to MySQL and see why. But the oddest thing happened: mysqld would not shut down.  It was sitting basically idle, doing absolutely nothing, and wouldn’t stop. There was nothing in any log files to show what might be going on.