Re: Discussion: Remove file statcache?

On 20.12.2024 at 20:26, Larry Garfield wrote: > Background: PHP has a not-often-considered feature, the stat-cache. That is, the runtime > caches the OS stat() call for files, so that subsequent reads on the same file can be faster. > However, it's even less realized that it's a single-file cache. It literally only applies > when you try to do two file-infomation operations on the same file in rapid succession, without any > other file reads in between. > > There's been some discussion about making the cache disable-able, though the consensus now > seems to be leaning toward getting rid of it outright: > > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/17178 > > Arnaud ran some quick benchmarks and found that disabling it has a less than 1% impact on > Symfony and WordPress. > > > https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/17178#issuecomment-2554323572 > > Before we go any further, is there appetite among the voting population to remove it? > clearstatcache() and similar functions would get stubbed out as no-ops, but otherwise we'd just > hand the responsibility back to the OS where it belongs, which seems so far like it would be almost > an unmeasurable performance difference but remove some surprise complexity. > > Would you support such a removal? I still think the stat cache should be *deprecated* first. That gives users a chance to reconsider calling multiple stat related functions instead of doing a single stat() call. See my previous comment[1] for some further details. [1] <https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/5894#issuecomment-2546473892> Christoph