Re: Persistent PHP web application?

* Josh Whiting <jw-php@valleyfree.com>: > My web application (an online classifieds server) requires a set of > fairly large global arrays which contain vital information that most all > the page scripts rely upon for information such as the category list, > which fields belong to each category, and so on. Additionally, there are > a large number of function definitions (more than 13,000 lines of code > in all just for these global definitions). > > These global arrays and functions never change between requests. > However, the PHP engine destroys and recreates them every time. After > having spent some serious time doing benchmarking (using Apache Bench), > I have found that this code takes at least 7ms to parse per request on > my dual Xeon 2.4ghz server (Zend Accelerator in use*). This seriously > cuts into my server's peak capacity, reducing it by more than half. > > My question is: is there a way to define a global set of variables and > functions ONCE per Apache process, allowing each incoming hit to run a > handler function that runs within a persistent namespace? OR, is it > possible to create some form of shared variable and function namespace > that each script can tap? Run it as a SOAP server, and have the web requests communicate with the SOAP server. That way you can keep the heavy-hitting stuff in memory, but still maintain the flexibility of a traditional PHP web app. PHP5 has native soap functions (http://php.net/soap), but you could also use the PEAR SOAP libraries (http://pear.php.net/packages/soap). -- Matthew Weier O'Phinney | mailto:matthew@garden.org Webmaster and IT Specialist | http://www.garden.org National Gardening Association | http://www.kidsgardening.com 802-863-5251 x156 | http://nationalgardenmonth.org