On 31/10/2012 13:46, Alex Nikitin wrote:
Hey guys (and/or gals),
I have heard this question entirely too many times, I think at some point
Rasmus just stopped responding to it. The real reason that PHP is not
threaded has nothing to do with PHP internal or extension thread safety,
the reason is more to the extent that it doesn't make sense to add
threading to PHP, it will only increase code and model complexity and
create more points of failure, but again the reason is not this, the reason
is that it doesn't make sense in PHP's native environment to add threading
in the first place. Natively PHP is summoned by a web server, yes you can
call PHP in CLI, but that's not it's point market, PHP is first and
foremost a server-side language for the web and it is ran by a web server
such as Apache or Nginx or IIS(i wouldn't know why you would use IIS, but
it could be). All of these web servers (maybe with exception of IIS, i
wouldn't know) work pretty much on the same principal, you have the main
process that spawns a bunch of worker threads (this is adjustable in
configuration, but is typically 1 per cpu thread). These threads are what
actually process the requests and call PHP, meaning that if multiple
threads are processing multiple requests, multiple instances of PHP will be
called. This is why adding threading to PHP makes absolutely no sense, why
would you spawn threads in something that is already being called by a
thread? Don't get me wrong, threads spawning other threads is a solution,
but it is a solution on massively parallel architectures, such as the
GPGPUs that can handle over a thousand threads, and it is a solution for an
entirely different problem, namely costly conditional statements; PHP on
the other hand runs on a general purpose processor that already cache
thrashes and runs into issues with instruction pipelines in parallel
execution, adding more threads to it would do nothing for performance (or
make it worse), make for more complex code and introduce new issues, like
for example how do you test threaded code, debugging, messaging, etc, which
will introduce new places where php apps fail, new security concerns, etc,
and I think we are far from having current issues fixed...
Want to parallelize your PHP execution? Learn to love curl_multi :)
In this case, fix the program, not the programming language. Just my $0.02
-- Alex
--
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer
is doing until it’s too late. ~Seymour Cray
You're very wrong.
Adding threading doesn't increase complexity at all, the fact is, that
people are coming up with horrible ways to execute what they should be
executing in threads. It's 2012, my mobile phone has a dual core
processor !! All that adding threading does is allow those people
bending over backwards - using horrible hacks just to do two things at
once - to do things properly.
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