Re: what PHP really needs

You can use shared memory too...only on *nix flavors though. -- Ray On Fri, 2004-01-23 at 12:42, PHP general wrote: > There's 1 really important thing missing in PHP as I see it, and it's the > ability to keep variables in memory for as long as > the programmer choose. If this was possible there could be some truly great > optimizations done. Some things are very > slow to create but very fast to work with. I wrote a XML class a couple of > days ago and while it's extremly quick to > search and work with, sadly it's rendered pretty much useless since creating > the tree which it uses isn't fast enough. > > I've heard there's a feature like this in Cold Fusion, which every Cold > Fusion user seems to think of as the holy grail, > and I would have to agree with them. > > One thing I've heard they use this for is to load an entire database into > system memory. I don't know exactly how it's > works but imagine having the whole database in system memory. When you > change data you update it both in system > memory and on the drive, but when you select (which is what you mostly do), > you just query the mirror in system memory. > > So how cost effective could this be? 1GB of system memory is pretty much > minimum on a decent server today. > Assuming the site generates aprox 1 million bytes worth of data every day > (storing images and other types of massive data > in the tables would perhaps not be apropiate) the site could be up and > runing for 1 thousand days. And if you just keep > tables that gets queried a lot, but doesn't get altered often, you could > most likely come up with a great compromise. > > I can't say for sure how much faster things would be but I'm guessing at > several 1000% faster, however I might be way off. > > The only drawback I can see is that there might be multi threading issues, > so if this would be implemented a new key word > would probably have to be introduced to make data mutexed, or perhaps the > other way around to avoid to many people > scratching their heads. > > /Sebastian Karlsson