A Doh-situation

I had a real 'Doh'-situation yesterday, it happened when I was trying out php-sat on several PHP-projects. I began with trying php-sat on the sources of Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin and Joomla.

The results for these projects are very nice, considering the current status of the tool. I was surprised to see that the pattern C003, which is very simple and even documented in the PHP-documentation, was actually flagged in both phpMyAdmin and Joomla. The functions to blame can be found in Table.class.php (generateAlter and generateFieldSpec) from the phpMyAdmin-source, and database.php (database) from the Joomla-source.

A pattern that was found quiet often in phpMyAdmin is pattern O001.
I have done some simple tests and it turns out that passing multiple parameters is roughly twice as fast as using concatenation. This blog-entry confirms this by explaining what happens behind the scenes in both cases.
So the pattern describes a possible optimization that is not very useful if this patterns occurs only once. But if it happens in 32 cases in a single source file that is called common.lib.php, which is probably used commonly in the project, then it might be useful to take a look at it.

But back to the 'Doh'-situation. After trying php-sat in the projects I wanted to run it on a large php-codebase. A great resource of PHP-code can be found in the PEAR repository. The PHP-code for PEAR itself is about 30000 LOC so I gave this to php-sat first. I was not surprised that it took a while because the code is pretty large. But I got a little suspicious after about 10 minutes of just seeing files being parsed. So I put some more log-messages in the php-front-library and tried again. It turned out that php-sat was including 3 files in a cycle, but the includes happened because of a 'require_once'. I was pretty sure that I had fixed this problem by checking whether a file was previously included, and this was indeed the case. The only problem was that I put the files that where included in the environment after going into a file. The solution is pretty obvious, but such situations just call for a slap on your own forehead.