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Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 21:04:49 +1000
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To: Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com>
CC: Gabriel Sosa <sosagabriel@gmail.com>,
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] making system calls from a php extension
From: mail_ben_schmidt@yahoo.com.au (Ben Schmidt)

On 11/05/11 2:33 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> On May 10, 2011, at 21:01, Gabriel Sosa<sosagabriel@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I'm basically using lynx to convert some html into plain text
>>
>> basically replicating the following command:
>>
>> *lynx -pseudo_inlines=off -hiddenlinks=merge -reload -cache=0 -notitle
>> -force_html -dump -nocolor -stdin*
>>
>> I've been looking but I didn't find any other library capable to do
>> the same with "almost" the same quality.
>>
> You may be right that it does it better than other mechanisms and it
> may be the way to go. But it sounds like you need it to be faster. You
> are still not going to gain much simply by calling lynx from C. The
> only way to speed this up is to not have to fork and exec a new
> process on every request. One way to do that would be to figure out
> how to talk to an already running instance of lynx. Then write a
> little Gearman wrapper for them and launch a bunch of Gearman workers.
> Another benefit of this approach is that you will be able call lynx
> asynchronously.

Rasmus is spot on, but another thought is that if your content is often
the same, caching it somehow (either with PHP code or with a PHP
extension--I would just try PHP code for starters) could yield large
speed-ups, too.

Ben.