I think having it configurable is a must. Turning it on / off via a compile 
flag will not suit everyone.

Eg - I have a situation where I would not want to run garbage collection for 
web pages served off my server due to the performance hit, however I also have 
a CLI script which I run to do complex, but repetitive tasks for ~half an hour. 

Now this is not really a big deal to me as I managed to rid most of the leaks 
by nulling out cyclic references, however that took a lot of work which could 
have been avoided by this.

Could I suggest also enabling it by default for CLI?


SCOTT MCNAUGHT
Software Developer

Synergy 8 / +617 3397 5212
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


-----Original Message-----
From: Rasmus Lerdorf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, 5 December 2007 5:17 AM
To: Antony Dovgal
Cc: Andi Gutmans; Cristian Rodriguez; internals@lists.php.net
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Garbage collector patch

Antony Dovgal wrote:
> On 04.12.2007 18:31, Andi Gutmans wrote:
>> You may be right longer term but shorter term I still believe there may be 
>> stability issues with this patch some of which we haven't figured out. 
>> Although we did testing and found crash bugs I wouldn't trust our level of 
>> testing to deem it stable. If we go down the route of always on we could 
>> have a hidden ini file (not listed in php.ini-dist and phpinfo()) which we 
>> can advise to turn off if something goes wrong and once we can enough 
>> confidence that there aren't any lurking bugs we could remove it.
> 
> You mean provide an ini setting to be able to turn it Off?
> But why do you call it "always On" then?
> And what's the difference comparing to what you've proposed earlier?
> 
> Concerning the stability issues, I'd say we have quite good chance 
> to make it stable enough, as (I hope) 5.3.0 is not going to be released 
> for at least several months more.
> 
> Companies that are especially concerned of performance/stability 
> are encouraged to step forward and give us a hand.

Companies concerned about performance aren't going to use it at all.  A
5% hit is significant given that it doesn't fix anything that a company
already concerned about performance/stability cares about.  Super leaky
or recursively allocating scripts have long since been weeded out of
those code bases, so it is a 5% performance hit with no gain.

I am not arguing that it isn't useful in the general case.  It will make
PHP more robust on loosely controlled servers for what amounts to only a
small penalty, but at the same time it is an easy 5% win for people with
dedicated servers running well-written code.

-Rasmus

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