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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2004 10:10:59 +0200
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Subject: Ability to lower PHP memory usage
From: andi@zend.com (Andi Gutmans)

Hey,

I just compiled PHP using --disable-all and realized that there's a shit 
load of relatively useless stuff still being compiled into it.
The first thing I realized is that regex is still being compiled in by 
default. Are any parts of PHP's core relying on regex, thus, requiring it 
to be in the minimal build? I think most people today are using pcre and it 
would be great if we could support a version without regex.
The second problem is in ext/standard with a zillion of functions. A lot of 
them are in my opinion not used by the majority of users and it would be 
great to be able not to compile them into PHP. Things that come to my mind:
a) crc32
b) cyr_convert
c) image
d) lcg
e) metaphone
f) soundex
g) levenshtein
h) sha1
i) uuencode

and probably some other stuff,

In order for PHP users to get the most out of their servers, being able to 
reduce memory footprint as much as possible is quite important so that they 
can increase MaxClients to as much as possible.

As we're in a code freeze for RC1 it's a bit late to do something about it, 
but I think it'd be nice to brainstorm about this to see how we can solve 
this, maybe for 5.1? If regex isn't required by the core that's one of the 
first things I'd like to see disabled when building with --disable-all.
I think ext/standard should maybe be split up into two, the first ext/core 
and the second ext/standard where ext/core is the stuff which *really* 
needs to be part of PHP such as strlen(), file functions and pretty much 
stuff I didn't list in my list :)

Any thoughts? Ideas? Flames? :)
Andi