Comments on: Don’t Believe The Lies: PHP Isn’t Thread-Safe Yet

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:19:48 +0000

I finally got around to testing Quercus + Resin; unfortunately the combination’s load times for individual PHP pages is around 110-120% of that for our currently (very finely-tuned) IIS + PHP + FastCGI implementation.

Perhaps Resin Professional, which stores the compiled PHP opcode instead of acting as a real-time interpreter, would provide a better performance output but the free solution isn’t good enough.

By: Teodor

Teodor — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:29:16 +0000

Given this (ant not only) issue and many language defficiencies and problems I’m on my way to switch every simple to moderate project to .NET.
If there is no acceptable production-safe PHP engine alternative, then you’re better of leaving PHP and begin using some real language.
It’s a shame a language with almost no reasonable planning and designing behind it has become so widespread and we are stuck to it when it comes to some website that needs to run everywhere.
Even worse, MS is planning a ‘good’ future for it on Windows. Maybe MS should take control and make it much better.

By: Grandpa

Grandpa — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 03:51:12 +0000

Here is somebody for you to fight
http://doughboy.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/apache-worker-and-php/

and btw thanks for the caucho + jrockit tip, really interesting stuff!!!

By: Computer Guru

Computer Guru — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:30:17 +0000

Thanks for the links, Stephen.

We’ve looked at a number of alternative PHP processing engines, but haven’t found a stable, reliable, and - most importantly - compatible implementation out there. (The bigger ones are RoadRunner and Phalanger; neither of which work well with the majority of the apps we tested).

Quercus sounds like a promising solution, I’m testing it now

By: Stephen Hassard

Stephen Hassard — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:07:31 +0000

You might want to give Caucho’s implementation of PHP called Quercus a try. It offers some great performance gains, and in combination with BEA’s JRockit it might make a great alternative to the standard PHP interpreter.

http://www.caucho.com/

http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/content/products/jrockit/

By: Kevin Farnham

Kevin Farnham — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:08:10 +0000

It would seem that attaining true thread-safety is going to be critical for PHP’s future. We’ve reached the point today where almost every computer sold has more than one processing core. It’s a huge challenge. I’ve worked on multithreaded development projects since the early 1990s, mostly multithreading old Fortran algorithmic libraries. Today I’m community manager for the Threading Building Blocks open source project — a C++ template library for multithreading applications.

Multithreading existing code is not easy, so I can certainly sympathize with the PHP developers. But, if your language is not threadsafe, you’re going to fall away as a viable language as we proceed into the multicore future…

By: Jimmy Arnolds

Jimmy Arnolds — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:15:18 +0000

Yeah, this is so true. More than once I’ve filed a bug report about stability of PHP under multi-threaded environments and it’s been blown-off as a “low-priority, known issue” by the people in charge.

I notice they don’t explicitly call the first release “thread safe” but slyly lead you to believe so by explictly labeling the second “non-thread-safe” - that’s a dirty trick to play.