His publication
ElephantPHP
PHP · every other Tuesday
Modern PHP from the engine up: opcache, FPM, and the machinery under the framework.
Author
Muhammet Şafak
Writes ElephantPHP — modern PHP internals, from the engine up.
Muhammet Şafak has written PHP for eighteen years, most of them inside systems that were already in production when he arrived — payment gateways, logistics platforms, government portals. He maintains a family of open-source libraries for routing, caching, and database access, and he reads engine source the way other people read changelogs.
ElephantPHP began as private notes on the Zend engine and FPM, kept while debugging a fleet that misbehaved only on Thursdays. Each issue takes one mechanism — opcache invalidation, the observer API, worker lifecycle — and explains what it does, what it costs, and where it breaks. Nothing is published that he has not reproduced himself.
He writes in English, works in Turkish, and debugs in whatever the stack trace is speaking.
Recent work
- How FPM decides a worker is dead18 Aug 2026
- Opcache preloading in production: numbers from a real fleet4 Aug 2026
- The observer API: profiling without a C extension21 Jul 2026
- Reading Zend VM opcode dumps without crying7 Jul 2026
- Generators are a control-flow tool, not an optimization23 Jun 2026
Elsewhere in the network
Gopheria · PyDepth · JSLedger · JVMScope · SQLPress — five more publications, five more authors, one imprint.