I use pcntl_fork() for writing parallel multi-process applications and it works pretty well. Also, you can use shared memory queues to pass messages between processes (ie msg_get_queue()).
I wrote a little proof of concept library a while ago to demonstrate: http://github.com/dhotson/Phork It's not that complicated... the main part of it is only ~110 lines of code: http://github.com/dhotson/Phork/blob/master/classes/Phork/Process.php Regards, Dennis On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 1:32 AM, speedy <speedy.s...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello PHP folks, > > I've seen this discussed previously, and would like to add a few > arguments for the multi-threading side vs. async processing, > which I've seen mentioned as a viable alternative: > > 1. Imagine that from time to time, some background processing takes 1 > second of CPU time - w/o multithreading, all your async operations, > like accepting a connection to a socket, aio or others are basically > stalled. So, async is a good approach, but does not work as a magic > wand for all problem spaces. Alternatively, you could fork and then do > the > processing, but then the state syncing of the forked background > processing > results with the main thread requires a whole new protocol / switching > to > interprocess communication, which makes such developments > unnecessarily > hard. Threads exist for a _reason_ not only because they sound cool. > > 2. Without thread support, it is not possible to use multi-core > processing > paradigms directly from PHP - which means PHP relies on external > frameworks for > that feature, which, in a sense, makes it a non-general-purpose > language. > It _could become_ a general purpouse tool, if it had proper > multi-threading > support built-in. > > I, personally, considered developing websockets / nanoserv server > stack with PHP > and bumped into the multithreading limitation - AFAIK it is the only > big feature > separating PHP from the general purpouse languages. Everything else is > well > integrated with lots of external libraries/modules giving rise to > potential rapid > application development while using it. > > Cheers and let me know about your thoughts, and potential core > implementation > issues regarding developing this language feature. > > -- > Best regards, > speedy mailto:speedy.s...@gmail.com > > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
