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Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 20:53:41 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] making system calls from a php extension
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

On 05/10/2011 08:42 PM, Gabriel Sosa wrote:
> hello everyone!
>
> I'm trying to gain some speed by moving a function from PHP legacy
> code to C and making an extension. I'm trying to call *lynx* from the
> command line since their C api isn't something soo nice likely to use
> it as any other libXX

If it were me I would take a step back and look at what lynx was 
actually needed for and whether there are other libraries out there that 
can do similar things. Like libcurl + the html parsing available in 
libxml2, for example. I'm assuming you are calling lynx in order to use 
its html parser?

Moving something from PHP to C for performance reasons, but leaving in 
the call to an external program isn't going to buy you much, if 
anything, since most of your time is spent forking and launching that 
external program on each request.

-Rasmus