Hello everyone! A few months ago there was a proposed RFC for having wall clock time for timeout [1]. It seemed like there was not a lot of push back against it [2] with an exception of Nikita's comment about having 2 ini settings vs having a toggle on the existing ini setting [3]
[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/max_execution_wall_time [2] https://externals.io/message/112492#113210 [3] https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/6504#issuecomment-743064911 The reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm interested in the possibility of having this functionality in PHP as a potential solution for serverless environment hard limits. The number #1 issue with running PHP on AWS Lambda via Bref is caused by API Gateway having a hard limit of 30 seconds. When combining that with the fact that AWS Lambda inside VPC loses internet connectivity (unless a NAT Gateway / NAT Instance exists in the VPC), it's extremely common to have code attempting to connect to a database, make an API call or try to upload data into S3 and get confronted with Server Error - Task timed out. This gets aggravated by the fact that we have no opportunity to flush out logs, meaning any attempt to write logs to stderr is simply lost and it makes it an arduous task to debug. I did a quick testing around register_shutdown_function and it seems to provide what we need if we had wall time-based timeout. ``` <?php ini_set('max_execution_time', 3); register_shutdown_function(function () { echo 'Moment 1: we have an opportunity for flushing out stderr' . PHP_EOL; while(true) { // curiously this will run for an extra 2 seconds and throw another fatal error. } }); echo 'Moment 0: script is very early' . PHP_EOL; while (true) { // this will run for 3 seconds and throw a fatal error. } ``` Essentially the end goal is to be able to set PHP timeout smaller than the external environment (e.g. 27 seconds PHP vs 30 seconds API Gateway) and have an extra 2 seconds worth of time to help users see their logs, debugging backtrace and/or line of code where the exception was thrown. This would help immensely to diagnose general timeout issues. I understand that the use case described may be too niche (AWS being a single vendor), but given that there was not much push back 7 months ago, perhaps my email can be interpreted as just yet another huge benefit the serverless community would have if such a feature could be introduced to PHP. Is there anything I can do to help bring that RFC to a vote for PHP 8.2? -- Marco Aurélio Deleu
