9 ms·

PHP 5.3.3 Released

49 points by Uncle_Sam 16y ago

carbocation 16y ago
"Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI." This looks particularly interesting. I googled it and found http://php-fpm.org/ http://php-fpm.org/ . I didn't previously realize that a fastcgi implementation had been merged into PHP core. Sweet!
- Uncle_Sam 16y ago
  Yes! It's main and biggest news!
- amk 16y ago
  Can someone explain this to me?
  - mattyb 16y ago
    PHP's two most popular SAPIs are embedded and FastCGI. mod_php is embedded inside of Apache (and is problematic), whereas the FastCGI SAPI communicates via TCP or a Unix socket. The two major (there may be others) FastCGI process managers are spawn-fcgi (a Lighttpd subproject, http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki) and PHP-FPM. The latter is quite stable and has some nifty features (http://php-fpm.org/ http://php-fpm.org/). PHP-FPM used to exist as a patch for PHP (http://php-fpm.org/downloads/ http://php-fpm.org/downloads/). It's now in core, and can be built with the --enable-fpm configure flag.
    - barfoomoo 16y ago
      A bit off the topic, is there any good introductory doc on how apache modules work?
      - mattyb 16y ago
        Yep: http://amzn.com/0132409674 http://amzn.com/0132409674
        barfoomoo 16y ago
        Thanks.
    - robryan 16y ago
      I wonder if this solves the problem I've had of having a single APC cache across php-cgi children with fastcgi. From what I read handing the process management off to PHP would achieve that, is that what this is doing?
      - carbocation 16y ago
        Glad I'm not the only one who cares about this, but don't have more information - only the same question.
      - mattyb 16y ago
        Yes (second to last comment): http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=11988 http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=11988 How have you been managing the php-cgi children?
        robryan 16y ago
        Oh cool, I have read that post before but must have skipped over it. I tried the hackish method in that last comment before but it gave me problems. At the moment given that it's fairly low load what I was doing I just left the default method in place which doesn't share APC.
    - davidw 16y ago
      What's "problematic" about mod_php? It's got to be one of the more widely used bits of software out there. Like anything, I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved, but perhaps it's better to be a bit more explicit about what they are rather than stopping at "problematic"?
      - jolan 16y ago
        I've had a couple problems but I wouldn't call it problematic: 1) When you select mod_php/the Apache SAPI, certain functions get disabled like chroot() and pcntl_fork() since they're not safe to be used under Apache. This is annoying when you have some backend scripts that need those functions. 2) If you run PHP with all the popular plugins, you're looking at about 15MB per Apache process/thread. @256 active clients that's almost 4GB of RAM. Insane, especially considering it's loaded in memory whether or not the requested resource is PHP or not. I recently switched to Nginx+FastCGI and I'm very happy with the speed and memory usage. FPM makes it even better.
        davidw 16y ago
        How much memory does each FCGI process take up, just out of curiosity? You still need 256 of them to deal with that many concurrent connections.
        jolan 16y ago
        I run bare php FCGI processes that use 4.5MB of memory and use dl() to load the extra libs on demand now.
        jonhohle 16y ago
        For 2, wouldn't most of that memory be either COW or physically shared, read-only? It's been about a year and a half since I've operated a large PHP site, but I don't recall the apache workers getting anywhere close to 15MB each, unless a request was operating on a larger than normal dataset. (this site used curl, gd, memcache, uuid, pspell, tidy, soap, and probably some others I've forgotten, loaded dynamically.)
- jdub 16y ago
  PHP has had a fastcgi implementation for ages, but this adds process management to it.
- stevenwei 16y ago
  Great news. This makes it significantly easier to get PHP running on Nginx.
  - mattyb 16y ago
    Fortunately, it was never hard. Before (5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.3.2.tar.bz2 cd php-5.3.2 svn co http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/trunk/sapi/fpm sapi/fpm ./buildconf --force ./configure --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install After (5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.3.3.tar.bz2 cd php-5.3.3 ./configure --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install Before (< 5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.2.13.tar.bz2 wget php-fpm.org/downloads/php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.14.diff.gz gzip -cd php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.14.diff.gz | patch -d php-5.2.13 -p1 cd php-5.2.13 ./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install After (< 5.3.x): PHP 5.2.x is no longer supported. Stop using it. nginx's configuration is the same for all.
    - stevenwei 16y ago
      Eh, the main difference to me is that now it is part of the official source, it will likely be included in package manager builds on major Linux distros, instead of having to compile from source at all.
robryan 16y ago
The backwards compatibility break they did got me thinking, it would be great to see a major PHP release that broke backwards compatibility to get things right as Python have done with version 3. I think anyone not interested in porting their code would already have a PHP more than suitable for their needs.
- mattyb 16y ago
  If you could break backwards compatibility, what would you change?
  - robryan 16y ago
    I just mean the little niggling things people complain about like all the functions in the global namespace, inconsistent arguments, inconsistent error handling. I guess though a lot of PHP support comes from the deploy everywhere make minimal changes to old code ideas, so I can see why their quiet happy to not want to break to much old code.
    - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
      What would be left would be hardly recognizable as PHP.
      - randallsquared 16y ago
        I dunno... I think it would be essentially the same for new users (since they have to look up things anyway), and it would certainly feel like PHP...
        al_james 16y ago
        Actually, I agree. I have often thought there is a space for a revamped PHP, with compatible syntax (because people know it) but with many of the niggles removed and a better core library.
c00p3r 16y ago
Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI. - good news.
ck2 16y ago
Still waiting for eaccelerator to catch back up. (their data storage API is removed from their 5.3.x build) Prefer it's stability over APC and xcache.
- mattyb 16y ago
  Can you describe APC's instability? I've had no problems, and in fact had issues with eAccelerator.

49 points by Uncle_Sam 16y ago

"Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI." This looks particularly interesting. I googled it and found http://php-fpm.org/ http://php-fpm.org/ . I didn't previously realize that a fastcgi implementation had been merged into PHP core. Sweet!

Uncle_Sam 16y ago
Yes! It's main and biggest news!
amk 16y ago
Can someone explain this to me?
- mattyb 16y ago
  PHP's two most popular SAPIs are embedded and FastCGI. mod_php is embedded inside of Apache (and is problematic), whereas the FastCGI SAPI communicates via TCP or a Unix socket. The two major (there may be others) FastCGI process managers are spawn-fcgi (a Lighttpd subproject, http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki) and PHP-FPM. The latter is quite stable and has some nifty features (http://php-fpm.org/ http://php-fpm.org/). PHP-FPM used to exist as a patch for PHP (http://php-fpm.org/downloads/ http://php-fpm.org/downloads/). It's now in core, and can be built with the --enable-fpm configure flag.
  - barfoomoo 16y ago
    A bit off the topic, is there any good introductory doc on how apache modules work?
    - mattyb 16y ago
      Yep: http://amzn.com/0132409674 http://amzn.com/0132409674
      - barfoomoo 16y ago
        Thanks.
  - robryan 16y ago
    I wonder if this solves the problem I've had of having a single APC cache across php-cgi children with fastcgi. From what I read handing the process management off to PHP would achieve that, is that what this is doing?
    - carbocation 16y ago
      Glad I'm not the only one who cares about this, but don't have more information - only the same question.
    - mattyb 16y ago
      Yes (second to last comment): http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=11988 http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=11988 How have you been managing the php-cgi children?
      - robryan 16y ago
        Oh cool, I have read that post before but must have skipped over it. I tried the hackish method in that last comment before but it gave me problems. At the moment given that it's fairly low load what I was doing I just left the default method in place which doesn't share APC.
  - davidw 16y ago
    What's "problematic" about mod_php? It's got to be one of the more widely used bits of software out there. Like anything, I'm sure there are tradeoffs involved, but perhaps it's better to be a bit more explicit about what they are rather than stopping at "problematic"?
    - jolan 16y ago
      I've had a couple problems but I wouldn't call it problematic: 1) When you select mod_php/the Apache SAPI, certain functions get disabled like chroot() and pcntl_fork() since they're not safe to be used under Apache. This is annoying when you have some backend scripts that need those functions. 2) If you run PHP with all the popular plugins, you're looking at about 15MB per Apache process/thread. @256 active clients that's almost 4GB of RAM. Insane, especially considering it's loaded in memory whether or not the requested resource is PHP or not. I recently switched to Nginx+FastCGI and I'm very happy with the speed and memory usage. FPM makes it even better.
      - davidw 16y ago
        How much memory does each FCGI process take up, just out of curiosity? You still need 256 of them to deal with that many concurrent connections.
        jolan 16y ago
        I run bare php FCGI processes that use 4.5MB of memory and use dl() to load the extra libs on demand now.
      - jonhohle 16y ago
        For 2, wouldn't most of that memory be either COW or physically shared, read-only? It's been about a year and a half since I've operated a large PHP site, but I don't recall the apache workers getting anywhere close to 15MB each, unless a request was operating on a larger than normal dataset. (this site used curl, gd, memcache, uuid, pspell, tidy, soap, and probably some others I've forgotten, loaded dynamically.)
jdub 16y ago
PHP has had a fastcgi implementation for ages, but this adds process management to it.
stevenwei 16y ago
Great news. This makes it significantly easier to get PHP running on Nginx.
- mattyb 16y ago
  Fortunately, it was never hard. Before (5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.3.2.tar.bz2 cd php-5.3.2 svn co http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/trunk/sapi/fpm sapi/fpm ./buildconf --force ./configure --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install After (5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.3.3.tar.bz2 cd php-5.3.3 ./configure --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install Before (< 5.3.x): tar xjvf php-5.2.13.tar.bz2 wget php-fpm.org/downloads/php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.14.diff.gz gzip -cd php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.14.diff.gz | patch -d php-5.2.13 -p1 cd php-5.2.13 ./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm ... make sudo checkinstall -D make install After (< 5.3.x): PHP 5.2.x is no longer supported. Stop using it. nginx's configuration is the same for all.
  - stevenwei 16y ago
    Eh, the main difference to me is that now it is part of the official source, it will likely be included in package manager builds on major Linux distros, instead of having to compile from source at all.

robryan 16y ago

The backwards compatibility break they did got me thinking, it would be great to see a major PHP release that broke backwards compatibility to get things right as Python have done with version 3. I think anyone not interested in porting their code would already have a PHP more than suitable for their needs.

mattyb 16y ago
If you could break backwards compatibility, what would you change?
- robryan 16y ago
  I just mean the little niggling things people complain about like all the functions in the global namespace, inconsistent arguments, inconsistent error handling. I guess though a lot of PHP support comes from the deploy everywhere make minimal changes to old code ideas, so I can see why their quiet happy to not want to break to much old code.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    What would be left would be hardly recognizable as PHP.
    - randallsquared 16y ago
      I dunno... I think it would be essentially the same for new users (since they have to look up things anyway), and it would certainly feel like PHP...
      - al_james 16y ago
        Actually, I agree. I have often thought there is a space for a revamped PHP, with compatible syntax (because people know it) but with many of the niggles removed and a better core library.

c00p3r 16y ago

Added FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) SAPI. - good news.

ck2 16y ago

Still waiting for eaccelerator to catch back up. (their data storage API is removed from their 5.3.x build) Prefer it's stability over APC and xcache.

mattyb 16y ago
Can you describe APC's instability? I've had no problems, and in fact had issues with eAccelerator.