Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:33683
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain synergy8.com designates 202.174.102.11 as permitted sender)
Reply-To: <scott.mcnaught@synergy8.com>
To: "'Rasmus Lerdorf'" <rasmus@lerdorf.com>,
	"'Antony Dovgal'" <tony@daylessday.org>
Cc: "'Andi Gutmans'" <andi@zend.com>,
	"'Cristian Rodriguez'" <judas.iscariote@gmail.com>,
	<internals@lists.php.net>
References: <698DE66518E7CA45812BD18E807866CEF88FDD@us-ex1.zend.net>	 <D37F0F93-EA19-4178-BCEE-91A7C36A7650@prohost.org> <7d5a202f0712031900i386f8964s675da26cc93af3fe@mail.gmail.com> <47550FAB.30002@daylessday.org> <698DE66518E7CA45812BD18E807866CEF890ED@us-ex1.zend.net> <475578BE.40908@daylessday.org> <4755A797.1020905@lerdorf.com>
In-Reply-To: <4755A797.1020905@lerdorf.com>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2007 05:45:59 +1000
Message-ID: <009001c836ae$4ba0add0$e2e20970$@mcnaught@synergy8.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Thread-Index: Acg2qld5ABuMWIYlTTy/bYT5VsG17AAAmnmg
Content-Language: en-au
Subject: RE: [PHP-DEV] Garbage collector patch
From: scott.mcnaught@synergy8.com

I think having it configurable is a must. Turning it on / off via a =
compile flag will not suit everyone.

Eg - I have a situation where I would not want to run garbage collection =
for web pages served off my server due to the performance hit, however I =
also have a CLI script which I run to do complex, but repetitive tasks =
for ~half an hour.=20

Now this is not really a big deal to me as I managed to rid most of the =
leaks by nulling out cyclic references, however that took a lot of work =
which could have been avoided by this.

Could I suggest also enabling it by default for CLI?


SCOTT MCNAUGHT
Software Developer

Synergy 8 / +617 3397 5212
scott.mcnaught@synergy8.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Rasmus Lerdorf [mailto:rasmus@lerdorf.com]=20
Sent: Wednesday, 5 December 2007 5:17 AM
To: Antony Dovgal
Cc: Andi Gutmans; Cristian Rodriguez; internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Garbage collector patch

Antony Dovgal wrote:
> On 04.12.2007 18:31, Andi Gutmans wrote:
>> You may be right longer term but shorter term I still believe there =
may be stability issues with this patch some of which we haven't figured =
out. Although we did testing and found crash bugs I wouldn't trust our =
level of testing to deem it stable. If we go down the route of always on =
we could have a hidden ini file (not listed in php.ini-dist and =
phpinfo()) which we can advise to turn off if something goes wrong and =
once we can enough confidence that there aren't any lurking bugs we =
could remove it.
>=20
> You mean provide an ini setting to be able to turn it Off?
> But why do you call it "always On" then?
> And what's the difference comparing to what you've proposed earlier?
>=20
> Concerning the stability issues, I'd say we have quite good chance=20
> to make it stable enough, as (I hope) 5.3.0 is not going to be =
released=20
> for at least several months more.
>=20
> Companies that are especially concerned of performance/stability=20
> are encouraged to step forward and give us a hand.

Companies concerned about performance aren't going to use it at all.  A
5% hit is significant given that it doesn't fix anything that a company
already concerned about performance/stability cares about.  Super leaky
or recursively allocating scripts have long since been weeded out of
those code bases, so it is a 5% performance hit with no gain.

I am not arguing that it isn't useful in the general case.  It will make
PHP more robust on loosely controlled servers for what amounts to only a
small penalty, but at the same time it is an easy 5% win for people with
dedicated servers running well-written code.

-Rasmus

--=20
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php