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Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2010 10:04:52 +1100
Message-ID: <g2i469956791004011604v210ad50dx89b65cd0d731cea7@mail.gmail.com>
To: speedy <speedy.spam@gmail.com>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=0016e6d99d03f3882b048334e306
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] php and multithreading (additional arguments)
From: dennis.hotson@gmail.com (Dennis Hotson)

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I use pcntl_fork() for writing parallel multi-process applications and it
works pretty well.
Also, you can use shared memory queues to pass messages between processes
(ie msg_get_queue()).

I wrote a little proof of concept library a while ago to demonstrate:
http://github.com/dhotson/Phork

It's not that complicated... the main part of it is only ~110 lines of code:
http://github.com/dhotson/Phork/blob/master/classes/Phork/Process.php

Regards,
Dennis

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 1:32 AM, speedy <speedy.spam@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello PHP folks,
>
>      I've seen this discussed previously, and would like to add a few
>      arguments for the multi-threading side vs. async processing,
>      which I've seen mentioned as a viable alternative:
>
>      1. Imagine that from time to time, some background processing takes 1
>      second of CPU time - w/o multithreading, all your async operations,
>      like accepting a connection to a socket, aio or others are basically
>      stalled. So, async is a good approach, but does not work as a magic
>      wand for all problem spaces. Alternatively, you could fork and then do
> the
>      processing, but then the state syncing of the forked background
> processing
>      results with the main thread requires a whole new protocol / switching
> to
>      interprocess communication, which makes such developments
> unnecessarily
>      hard. Threads exist for a _reason_ not only because they sound cool.
>
>      2. Without thread support, it is not possible to use multi-core
> processing
>      paradigms directly from PHP - which means PHP relies on external
> frameworks for
>      that feature, which, in a sense, makes it a non-general-purpose
> language.
>      It _could become_ a general purpouse tool, if it had proper
> multi-threading
>      support built-in.
>
>      I, personally, considered developing websockets / nanoserv server
> stack with PHP
>      and bumped into the multithreading limitation - AFAIK it is the only
> big feature
>      separating PHP from the general purpouse languages. Everything else is
> well
>      integrated with lots of external libraries/modules giving rise to
> potential rapid
>      application development while using it.
>
>      Cheers and let me know about your thoughts, and potential core
> implementation
>      issues regarding developing this language feature.
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  speedy                          mailto:speedy.spam@gmail.com
>
>
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>

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