Re: Thread safe extension homologation

Hello, on 09/28/2006 05:19 PM Pierre said the following: >> Is there any intention/plan to homologate PECL extensions in order to >> let developers know whether they are safe to use with multi-threaded >> Web servers? >> >> I think homologation could also be applied to core extensions but from >> what I read I guess most of them are thread safe already. > > It could be a very good addition. However it is a lot of work to really > valid each extension and the underlying libraries. One problem is the > very little usage of threaded environment by the PECL developers, it is > not the environment of choice. Right. OTOH, I think that is a chickeg-egg problem. Developers do not use PHP in multithread Web servers because some extensions are not ready for that kind of usage. As long as one needed extension is not ready, it will not help making all other extensions thread-safe. Anyway, the point is that not being usable on multithreaded servers, limits PHP scalability, I mean the number of simultaneous requests that a PHP based solution can handle per GB of RAM in the same server. To put this more into context of the trends of Web applications, as AJAX COMET applications become more and more desirable, pre-forked based Web server modes are not very convinient, as it may be necessary to hold HTTP connections for much more time than the usual short lived requests. Look here for more details about AJAX COMET applications. http://ajaxian.com/archives/comet-with-php I am aware that validating extensions (not just PECL but also core extensions) is not a trivial task. But I am afraid if that task is not ever started, people may have to look to other alternatives to PHP, as suggested by the comments to the post above. > I can think about three possible "labels": > > - Not thread safe: Known to fail, cannot be fixed easily or pointless > > - Thread safe > Fully tested, TS garanteed (if we can say so, there is always unknown > bugs) > > - Should be thread safe > no issue should raised, but the extension has not been intensively > tested, or not at all > I do develop in TS environment frequently (windows, linux, apache2 or > maintainer zts mode in console as tests), I should be able to help in > one way or another. I am not sure what you mean by tests. I'm afraid that for the lack of automated tools, we may need to move on to human-based code analisys. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator http://www.metastorage.net/ PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/