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Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2013 14:08:33 +0200
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] ZTS - why are you using it?
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 29, 2013 12:10 PM, "Zeev Suraski" <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The other main reason from my side to keep ZTS is Windows. Windows
> > cannot
> > > perform well using process based SAPI.
> >
> > Windows actually works quite well with FastCGI.  So well Microsoft even
> > created their own version for IIS.  It's outperforming the ISAPI module by
> > a wide margin.
>
> Laziness and design mistake. Everything on windows (AD,IIS, asp.net, etc) uses thread.
>
> And no, nuts is not faster. I am not talking about PHP zts, but in general.


Of course everything that is Windows native uses threads, but I don't
believe any language that is single-threaded on other platforms - has
a thread safe version for Windows.

I disagree that laziness and design mistakes are what makes ZTS
slower.  It's slower by design, since instead of relying on operating
system isolation - you have to emulate it yourself in userland code.

Contrary to popular belief FastCGI actually works very very well on
Windows, and has substantial advantages over using a server module -
even on Linux (it's no coincidence that there are hoards of users
migrating from Apache to nginx, where a server module isn't even an
option - and they're seeing better performance, not worse).

>
> > Other than Apache/Windows not having FastCGI support(*), I really can't
> > imagine any situation where using ZTS inside of a Web Server context makes
> > any sense at all.  I wouldn't call it a new trend, it's both old (I've
> > been pushing for it since at least 2006, probably earlier) and with very
> > solid technical reasons (faster, more reliable).
>
> Miss the rest of my mail or? Current implementation is outdated and slow.


How does it relate to what I said?
Regardless, a new implementation of ZTS will not change the
fundamentals. We're unlikely to ever achieve single-threaded
performance or reach the same level of stability with ZTS.  With a
system like PHP that is all about concurrency of stateless,
independent requests - I don't think we're going to reach any
meaningful limits any time soon.

FastCGI has another huge advantage, in that it breaks the 1:1 linkage
between a 'processing unit' (a web server process or thread) and a PHP
instance, and makes it an n:m mapping - in that you could have a lot
more web server processing units than you would need PHP instances.
That's one of the key reasons you can achieve better performance /
density with PHP on nginx than you can with Apache.  The same would
apply to IIS - ISAPI vs. FastCGI.

Zeev