Comment by bernawil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bernawil | Hacker News Reader

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  I once asked Rasmus about this face-to-face, during one of his presentations, specifically his thoughts about the pThread extension (https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php), and he responded that it was not required in a web context, as web servers already have threads per request so its a mute point.

if each web server thread that serves a request ends up spawning a full PHP process then it's not a mute point.

  pretty hard to proceed with some code that works with a DB when the connection can't be established, so proceed with what exactly other than error handling?

proceed with all the rest of the bootstrapping code in parallel instead of blocking and waiting for each.

  is a synchronous thread, as described above above. By design.

it's a synchronized full forked process. Because the runtime was written using memory unsafe C features from the start. By design doesn't excuse it being a bad design.

It's php-fpm persistent threads (seperate Daemon listening on port or socket), not web server threads, just to be specific. You have a lot of control of how many PHP threads you will allow per web node using php-fpm, very reliable tech. The days of mod_php are long gone.

So I meant one thread per request at the php-fpm level, not Nginx/HTTPD level.

* Edit for spelling

> PHP threads

Still, my understanding is that php-fpm spawns processes, not threads. What is "persistent" is the php-fpm daemon itself that's connected to nginx, but each request spawns a whole process which has to bootstrap your whole framework every time. That's the reason frameworks like symfony run almost mandatorily with something like opcache.

Oh I see, yes you are correct each request will bootstrap your PHP code stack framework each time (mitigate with opcache). Seems weird I know, but it goes back to that "shared nothing" principal: nothing is kept in memory between requests. On the plus side of that principal: nothing is kept in memory between requests that is not currently being used.

Coming from a Java background into PHP, this really confused me at first, until I started to think about PHP's approach as some kind of super-agressive garbage collection: everything gets released in that reqest thread once it's completed.

It's a fundemental design choice of the language that you have to embrace if you want to use PHP (I love it now, simplifies so much), or move on to another language.

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