Re: [PHP-DEV] parallell execution From: Andi Gutmans (andi <email protected>)
Date: 08/30/00

At 12:08 30/08/00 +0200, Stig S. Bakken wrote:
>Manuel Lemos wrote:
> >
> > Hello Stig,
> >
> > On 29-Aug-00 10:08:27, you wrote:
> >
> > >In Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 02:09:30PM +0200, Stig S. Bakken wrote:
> > >> I want this to implement "backgrounded" asynchronous I/O, which I guess
> > >> is more or less what you need it for as well?
> >
> > >Well yes, sort of. We would need asynchronous variants of the different
> > >functions. For instance if I want to do LDAP in the background, we would
> > >need to have asynchronous LDAP functions. It would be neat to have a
> > >more general mechanism. Of course if we made an asynchronous version of
> > >fopen, I could launch new PHP interpreters through the webserver instead,
> > >and have several PHP scripts run in parallell.
> >
> > >Well, I'll have a look at ticks and do some more thinking on how to
> > >use it.
> >
> > I heard that Perl has (will have?) a pool of interpreters read to run
> > scripts in the Apache 2 multi-threaded environment. This means that for
> > each Apache process there will be spare interpreters ready to run scripts
> > threads.
> >
> > Anyway, I think that the lack of support to start new script
> > processes/threads is one of the remaining things that PHP lacks and in some
> > cases makes it an inferior solution when compared to Perl and Java
> > servlets.
>
>I agree. Tcl has a beautifully clean C interface in that respect (at
>least it did back in the 7.3 days when I last touched it :-).
>
>It doesn't sound like this is too far away for PHP. We already
>support(?) multithreaded servers, so it's already possible to have
>several scripting engines running in a single process. However, usually
>when I assume things like this, Zeev or Andi can point out why this
>makes hell break loose. :-)

It is extremely hard to implement it and it would slow things down
considerably because we would need to use lots and lots of mutexes in
hundreds of places.
We did however add ticks support which gives you some kind of ability to do
background processing for slow things (i.e. opening sockets) so if it is
used wisely it could be used quite nicely.

Andi 

---
Andi Gutmans <andi <email protected>>
http://www.zend.com/

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