Re: making system calls from a php extension

On 11/05/11 2:33 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

On May 10, 2011, at 21:01, Gabriel Sosa<sosagabriel@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm basically using lynx to convert some html into plain text basically replicating the following command: *lynx -pseudo_inlines=off -hiddenlinks=merge -reload -cache=0 -notitle -force_html -dump -nocolor -stdin* I've been looking but I didn't find any other library capable to do the same with "almost" the same quality.

You may be right that it does it better than other mechanisms and it may be the way to go. But it sounds like you need it to be faster. You are still not going to gain much simply by calling lynx from C. The only way to speed this up is to not have to fork and exec a new process on every request. One way to do that would be to figure out how to talk to an already running instance of lynx. Then write a little Gearman wrapper for them and launch a bunch of Gearman workers. Another benefit of this approach is that you will be able call lynx asynchronously.

Rasmus is spot on, but another thought is that if your content is often the same, caching it somehow (either with PHP code or with a PHP extension--I would just try PHP code for starters) could yield large speed-ups, too. Ben.