Hi folks! Having played with RoR(sorry, Rails again...) for quite some time i noticed that once a RoR application FCGI process is spawned most of the frequently used classes and system config settings are already loaded and no class loading overhead happens when request is processed.
The whole application environment is simply loaded in the background hanging around and waiting for requests to come(FCGI lets you to reserve any amount of pre-spawned processes sitting in RAM) I wonder if it's possible to have something similar for Zend Framework(and other PHP applications) as well. Yes, we do have APC, eaccelerator and other opcode caches which save many of cpu cycles, however files are loaded in the runtime and any opcode cache still needs some time to fetch cached version of PHP code. Wouldn't it be great to have the most frequently used library classes to be available at once, before any actual request processing happens? The same story is about config files, why parse them in the runtime when we can preload them once the application process is spawned? This is not really an option for shared hosting since these heavy application processes may eat a lot of RAM but i think it's a very good solution for large applications on dedicated servers. What do you think about it? P.S. I'm not really sure if topic is called properly but seriously i couldn't think of a better analogy, correct me if i'm wrong please. -- Best regards, Pavel
