[PHP4BETA] MAJOR: Optimization patch committed

Hey. We've committed an optimization patch, which may not give us such a huge performance boost, has, possibly, major implications. Arguments in PHP4 are no longer passed using a hash table, but through a highly optimized stack. This should give us a serious performance boost, even though we haven't finished optimizing it yet and we haven't yet performed benchmarks. Thanks to macros, this change was done in an almost transparent way. There are very few functions that hardcode the type of 'ht' as HashTable, in fact, there was just one in formatted_print (even though I guess there are a few more in the various SQL modules, as far as I recall). In most cases, they can be safely converted to ht's new type, which is int, and is now the number of arguments passed to the function. The ARG_COUNT(n) macro now simply returns n, so ARG_COUNT() still works as advertised, as well as getParameters() and getParametersArray(), which were modified to make this change completely transparent. The only functions to which this change is not transparent are functions that relied on the ht actually being a hash table. From first glance, the only such function that comes in mind is minmax(). This function will have to be implemented in a different way for it to work with Zend. As Microsoft likes to say, this patch is not thoroughly tested and you should use it at your own risk. I haven't yet put it through the misery of running a full featured web site, but I will very soon, and I hope I'll sort out most outstanding bugs right away. It does, however, already run through many tests we've put it through. Stig - if you're running a site that's in one stage or another of being in production, make sure you don't rely on this for at least the next 24 hours, until it gets through its childhood :) I'd be happy to hear if it actually works for you, and whether you notice any performance gain. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/ For a PGP public key, finger bourbon@netvision.net.il -- PHP 4 Beta