Re: Re: optiizer extension import?

Hello, On 10/30/2002 09:33 PM, David Viner wrote:

instead of making another optimizer, why not pull in something like php-accelerator? in other words, i'm all for a good optimizer, but why spend time starting something from scratch when we could spend the same effort on perfecting a product that's already pretty close to what we might

want?

You need to ask that to Nick Lindrige. PHP Accelerator is not Open Source. When asked why not, Nick used to say that his code was not up to his standards to be ready for being released to the public. I never bought that and told him. It turned out that he had commercial intentions as I suspected and we know today. I have no problem with that. I don't know if Nick is making enough money to justify marketing the product but never mind because it is probably to late for somebody to share what he never meant to. If George is willing to share his work for the benefit of PHP community that is not interested or can't afford to pay, why bother expecting that Nick changes his mind now? Anyway, I believe that now the performance gap between APC and PHP Accelerator or Zend Cache is due to the extra optimization that is performed over Zend OPCODES before storing them in the cache. So, George optimizer is a great complement of his cache extension APC. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos > -----Original Message----- > From: Manuel Lemos [mailto:mlemos@acm.org] > Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 3:56 PM > To: pear-dev@lists.php.net > Subject: [PEAR-DEV] Re: optiizer extension import? > > > Hello, > > On 10/30/2002 08:10 PM, George Schlossnagle wrote: > >>I'd like to import an 'optimizer' zend_extension that does peephole >>optimizations on code. It will be PHP Group licensed. >> >>Votes? > > > All right! +1 of course. > > Anyway, this is the kind of extension that may not be useful when used > alone without caching the results to disk or shared memory. > > The reason is that when you optimize a chunk of code, you may end up not > running enough of it to compensate for the time that you took optimizing > the code. This is particularly true when you use generic classes that > are meant for several purposes but you end up not using it in the same > script for all it can do. > > This was the conclusion that I reached when I started using Zend > Optimizer with high levels of optimization that take longer to run. > Instead of speeding up code, it was retarding it and causing an huge > load on the server. > > It turned out that using a cache like APC was much better than using > Zend Optimizer alone because caching the compiler results got over most > of the compilation time overhead. Since APC could not run with Zend > Optimizer, I gave up Zend Optimizer. > > This turns out to become a good selling point for Zend Cache because the > difference between using Zend Optimizer and then using Zend Cache even > without Zend Optimizer is even more noticeable then using nothing at all > and then any cache (Zend Cache, APC, whatever). > > Zend Optimizer is free but it is like a "greek gift": it is good but > often is worse unless you use Zend Cache too. > > Anyway, I think your optimizer will always be a good thing with either > APC or bcompiler. Great job!