PHP Efficiency

[cweathers74]

Regular Perl for CGI has the problem of each request spawning a new Perl process.

Does PHP have this issue?

[SpectreReturns]

'Fraid so, as far as I know.

[chazzy]

I think sessions would keep up a persistent process.

[bokeh]

I think sessions would keep up a persistent process.Not so! When a script that called session_start() closes, the session array is stored to file. If you are using a shared server that information is available to everyone for as long as the session persists.

[chazzy]

Not so! When a script that called session_start() closes, the session array is stored to file. If you are using a shared server that information is available to everyone for as long as the session persists.

Hmmm..
But then how does it know to pull up the same previous session?

[bokeh]

The session files are named thus:sess_ce5dc2b323397d917dae0cc644a7f28e (no extension). When a script calls session_start() a check is made to see if the client sent a session cookie; if yes the filename the corresponds to the session id in the session cookie is opened. If there was no session cookie set on the client a new session file is created with it's own unique file name. This files are saved in /.../.../php/session

[NogDog]

Regular Perl for CGI has the problem of each request spawning a new Perl process.

Does PHP have this issue?
I believe (but was unable to confirm after a few minutes of web searching) that the typical SAPI webserver installation of PHP is similar to the mod_perl version of Perl, in that a single PHP process is launched by the webserver when it starts up. If you opt for the CGI installation of PHP, then it's like the non-mod_perl CGI installation of Perl, having to spawn the parser/compiler process for each request.