Re: story posted

[Bill Stoddard]

Sascha Schumann wrote:

a) is PHP not production ready with Apache 2.0 because it was not high
enough priority for PHP to be tested?

    The current Apache 2 support in PHP is based on filters only.
    That however is not well-supported by the scripting engine
    which prefers real file objects as input.

Then reimplement PHP as a handler/generator. You get the benefits of being able to install downstream filters w/o the headaches of implementing a filter. Personally I never thought implementing PHP as a filter was a good idea to begin with. yea, it's more flexible but that flexability comes at a high cost. And if no one is interested in what that extra flexability gains you, then the only thing accomplished is the code is more complex and bug prone. You know the saying "if the only tool you have is a hammer, then all problems look like nails"? Well for a while, apache 2.0 filters were 'the hammer'. Hopefully that is changing now.

    The next huge problem is thread-awareness of Unix libraries.
    There are still lots of issues with libraries which won't
    correctly in a threaded environment.

With the new Linux pthread implementations, folks will begin to see that threaded servers will offer big boosts in scalability and we'll start seeing more effort put into making popular PHP libraries thread safe. That's my crystal ball.


Bill