DISCUSSION: Optimizing PHP, Part Three

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Optimizing PHP, Part Three

Optimizing PHP, Part Three Features - Power Tools Written by Jeremy Garcia Last month

I find it disappointing that this article talks about performance tuning but fails to discuss the tradeoffs being made by the options given.

I am particularly alarmed by the --prefer-non-pic argument as this is a very serious CPU/memory tradeoff. If used incorrectly and in the wrong circumstances it can cause serious delays with memory consumption and library loading time due to the need for relocation. What scripts did you get the 10% improvements for? You might on a complicated CMS script but I would doubt you would get sufficient benefit for a simple database-driven page.

Note that I'm not a PHP guy at all - this is just a general comment on compiling any application that may have many CGI instances running at once without PIC code. There may be an improvement after all, but it would be nice to see the benchmarks and what circumstances are most appropriate.

EDIT: On rereading the article I noticed your condition "as an Apache DSO" attached. Sorry for misreading it. Non-PIC code may perform well under these circumstances.

Thanks for the feedback. That DSO bit is a very specific requirement for the '--prefer-non-pic' and it's actually a default on x86 machines in newer versions of PHP. As for the "simple database-driven page", by the time you need to do any kind of in-depth optimization like this, you should have a high traffic site that has much more than simple database-driven pages.

--jeremy