# making system calls from a php extension - Thread: https://externals.io/message/52265 - Original archive: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/52265 - Started by Gabriel Sosa on 2011-05-11T03:42:58+00:00 - Messages: 5 - Reply by email to internals@lists.php.net - More for agents: search with https://externals.io/search.md?q={query} · JSON API at https://externals.io/api · documentation at https://externals.io/llms.txt --- ## #52265 — Gabriel Sosa — 2011-05-11T03:42:58+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/52265#52265 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 Currently in PHP I'm doing a system call by using *proc_open* and sending and getting the response. Moving the code to C code I found that I need a "bidirectional" popen to replicate the PHP behavior, and since this is not allowed/implemented by default on POSIX environments I'm forced to fork to get this working. So back to my question: How feasible is to make fork calls on a PHP extension? Can I just do it or should I use php_stream_* functions to get a stream and make the system call? To avoid some questions the main idea of this extension is to be used on POSIX environments, so basically I dont care if this is not compatible with Windows. Thanks for your time. -- Gabriel Sosa Si buscas resultados distintos, no hagas siempre lo mismo. - Einstein --- ## #52266 — Rasmus Lerdorf — 2011-05-11T03:53:41+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/52265#52266 · In reply to: #52265 > 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 --- ## #52267 — Gabriel Sosa — 2011-05-11T04:01:17+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/52265#52267 · In reply to: #52266 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. Thanks > > > […] > > 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 > -- Gabriel Sosa Si buscas resultados distintos, no hagas siempre lo mismo. - Einstein --- ## #52268 — Rasmus Lerdorf — 2011-05-11T04:33:41+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/52265#52268 · In reply to: #52267 > 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 --- ## #52289 — Ben Schmidt — 2011-05-11T11:04:49+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/52265#52289 · In reply to: #52268 > > > […] > 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.