Neat idea. I have considered writing persistent php servers that just accept requests serially. Possibly you could write a fastcgi server in pure php. That would still delegate most of the grunt work to apache.
Sent from my iPhone On Apr 6, 2012, at 7:46 PM, Luke Scott <l...@cywh.com> wrote: > I've spent the last few days pouring over the Zend engine source code. I > think I have a basic understanding on the memory management. Likely what I > say may be incorrect, so I apologize in advance. > > What I'm trying to do is write an extension to persist PHP variables past > the end of the request in the SAPI to be used on the next request (different > user, same process). I'd like to do this without serialization. The reason > is certain objects in PHP (in a framework, for example) are not request > specific and it would be useful to have these objects already loaded and > usable without having to construct them on every request. (Sample use case: > Dependency injection like Guice without having to write physical containers > - using reflection, written in PHP) > > From what I've gathered thus far, it is impossible to do without copying the > non-persistent memory into persistent memory, and then back again. I'm > assuming this is because all the memory associated with PHP variables use > emalloc, which places it onto a stack that is disposed of at the end of the > request. > > So there seems to only be two ways to do this: > > 1 - Copy non-persistent memory into persistent memory (and back) using a > deep copy. Probably not very efficient. May not be much better than > serialization. > > 2 - Modify the Zend engine to flag objects/zvals as persistent so they > aren¹t thrown away until the process ends. > > #2 seems to be the better way to go. #1 seems to be the only way to do it as > an extension (maintaining its own stack). > > There seems to have been some discussion (7 years ago) of this mentioned > here under 6.9: > > http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html > > I've been able to do it somewhat with string zvals, but objects are a > different story (given that a zval contains a handle index referring an > entry in a bucket). The "goal", at least with objects, is the objects > doesn't destruct until the end of the process. With copying memory it looks > like I'd probably have to copy the object into my own bucket, modify the > original in zend's bucket so the destructor isn't called (destructor_callled > = 1), and then at the start of the request copy what's in my bucket into > zend's bucket. > > At this point I feel light a mad scientist. I'm hoping to gain some insight > on how this might be done properly with PHP 5.3/5.4 (or just 5.4) - even if > it involves modifying the Zend engine. Have you guys had any recent > discussions about doing this? > > Luke > > > -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
