ID: 27583 Comment by: anon at example dot com Reported By: stewart dot james at vu dot edu dot au Status: Open Bug Type: Documentation problem Operating System: Any PHP Version: Irrelevant New Comment:
It's true that we have a fully evolved 'Chicken' under Unix. However, under Windows, it's still in its pre-chicken state. A2 deals with that. It's what the APR is all about, dealing with poor POSIX conformance under windows. In my experience it does work better than A1 with PHP4, but persuading people of that is hard because of the notice the PHP developers have put up. <rant> Remember some people *have* to run MS Windows-- the decision out of their hands. And that is quite apart from the fact that there are (shriek! heresey!) situations where it is more appropriate than Unix.</rant> Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-03-19 01:37:32] rick at alpinenetworking dot com I for one would much prefer to use php on apache 2. One of the main reasons for this is that just about every linux distro known to man won't install apache 1.3 for me anymore. I have to manually install it and manually do all of the updates or look to a 3rd party to get package files for whatever distro I happen to be installing on. It would be much nicer if I could just use the version of apache that came with the distro and use the standard update tools to do security/version updates. It seems like there is no really good reason not to except "well it's no better and nobody really wants it." I'll bet that a lot more people would start running php on apache2 once it became stable. Is there anyway to make it so that php will only run on the prefork MPM so that you can at least say that php is stable under those conditions? It seems like that would satisfy the people who want to use php on apache 2 but not force you to deal with the thread safety issues for now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-03-14 18:27:52] stewart dot james at vu dot edu dot au Reading the first comment your probably right the chicken itself is fine just some of the feathers need fixing (e.g. some extentions abnd their libs being the issue not core PHP) - at least thats just info from reading the first reponse to this bug report. Thanks for the tip on subversion. Will look into that this week. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-03-14 12:33:07] [EMAIL PROTECTED] I suppose it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation with the one exception that we have a nicely working chicken already. Also note that you do not need Apache2 for SubVersion. You can use the standalone svnserve instead. See http://lxnt.info:8888/book/book.html#svn-ch-5-sect-4.2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-03-14 02:19:46] stewart dot james at vu dot edu dot au Ahhh enlightenment :) That gives me alot of info as to the issues with apache2 and php and why php is considered bad. Added to that the PHP group seem to be facing a chicken and the egg scenario. Alot of sites probably will not shift to PHP (I know my servers won't be) until php is considered safe for apache2. So I guess in large respects apache2 could stay fringe for php deployments. My...recent eagerness...to see apache2 and php in production started with subversion being released..among other things. Seems to be a real chicken and egg scenario the php group is faced with. apache2 is fringe. Once apache2 has a higher market share, then more people will probably code and get php to work well with apache2. But considering the popularit of apache2+php, apache2 probably won;t increase market share significantly until either php and apache2 are considered safe for a production environment or apache1.3 is dropped by the apache group. Anyway back to this bug report. Much of what was said in the previous post gave me sufficient information to give me enlightenment. I am sure it would for others as well. Perhaps that could be included in the docs? Cheers - and thanks for the enlightening, Stewart ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2004-03-13 18:26:12] [EMAIL PROTECTED] We are not talking about just Apache2 here. We are talking about Apache2+an MPM+PHP+3rd Party Libs. The folks at apache.org are only concerned with Apache2 itself, and for serving up static files it is better than Apache1 in many respects. However we have to worry about a lot more stuff here. In fact, we couldn't care less about serving up static files. The main issues as I see them are: 1. Thread safety issues. - It is very difficult to track down threading problems and we don't have decent tools to help us. - The thread safety of many 3rd party libraries are unknown quantities and can depend on the OS, libc and even compile flags. - Many distributions seem to ship with the Worker MPM as the default and that is the MPM that gets the most attention. This is a hybrid multi-process, multi-threaded MPM. 2. You can eliminate the threading problem by running the prefork MPM which effectively makes Apache2 behave just like Apache1 in the way it forks processes and serves one request at a time per process. Issues here: - Apache2 itself is rather fringe still. It has approximately a 5% marketshare vs. 65% for Apache1 at the time of this and out of that I would guess the majority are running the Worker MPM. So we are talking about a fringe MPM in a fringe server. This means it has not had anywhere near the attention from people running large production web server farms that it needs for me to comfortably say that this is a solid piece of code with all the kinks worked out. - The benefits of moving to Apache2+prefork are questionable. The new filter API would be one of the benefits, but it still has some issues and by default we run PHP as a handler, not a filter currently. You can optionally run it as a filter but people have had problems with that. Until such a time when enough clueful PHP people think there are enough realworld useful features in Apache2-prefork or even Apache2-threaded to actually sit down and bang away at PHP and the majority of the PHP extensions under Apache2. Or if enough regular users report back that they tried it and had absolutely no problems then we will change our reccomendation, but for the time being I don't think that we in good faith can tell users that Apache2+PHP is something they should be putting into production. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/27583 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=27583&edit=1
