oh by the way, I don’t want to give a wrong impression about the speed of php. Yes it is true that in a head to head race well written c will run faster than the equivalent php. But there is more to the story than that because how you approach the problem will have a huge affect on what the overall speed will be, as does the computer that it runs on.

In this specific case, I replaced a many years old (but no slouch) computer with a newer/faster one, and I replaced a “big name” email system written in c with a custom made program written in php. And I was pleasantly surprised that in the one place where it counted most, sending/receiving a message from/to a client email program. My php program was noticeably faster. Enough faster that end-users commented on it.

Now how much of that speed difference is because of the newer/faster computer, and how much of that speed difference is because the c program tried to be all things to all people and my php program was specialized in doing only one job and doing it well. I can not say what the cause of the difference is.

All I can tell you is that in this specific instance, the php program was measurably faster than the c program that it replaced. So it is not valid to assume that the c program will always be faster. But more importantly is just the fact that for most needs, php is fast enough.

Codeslinger

Who cares how long it takes the program to run as long as it runs fast enough to get the job done? Far more important are the inherent security benefits of PHP with regard to buffer overflows and other attacks. It takes a lot of extra effort to make a c program secure against buffer overflows but PHP automatically and robustly provides that protection.

Slow and memory hogging?? I think not! Fact is PHP has a very small memory footprint and although there may have been some versions in the past that did leak memory those problems are long gone, PHP is very reliable as a daemon. If your program is leaking memory it’s not PHP’s fault.

I wrote an email server, POP3 and SMTP entirely in PHP. I wrote it because it was time to replace the creaky old email system with something more up to date. I spent two weeks looking at all the different email systems out there, reading the docs and especially the bug reports. And even installed a couple of them. And in the end I concluded that I could do a much better job than what was available, so I did.

My PHP email server has been running in production 24/7 with hundreds of users for over six months and has processed half a million messages. The only time it ever had a problem was when the maildir ran out of disk space… the problem was that my code to detect this was looking at the free space of the wrong disk/partition, oops…. but even that recovered gracefully.

So yes, daemons written in PHP are Fast Secure Reliable and programmer productivity is high.

I’ve also written a web server in PHP. But mine is not as full featured as the http://nanoweb.si.kz project that I recently discovered. I wrote my php web server to solve a specific problem for a specific need, but it turned out so well that I am thinking about replacing apache with it, the result should be higher performance and less memory use, due to the php framework only being loaded once instead of for each request, similar to how fastcgi works but with better integration.

Bottom line is that PHP is a wonderful and very capable language.
I am very interested in your DNS project, go for it!!!

Codeslinger

In my experience PHP isn’t cut out for being a networking daemon.

a) It has way too many memory leaks. Unless you are managing your PHP processes, killing them every so often, you will have problems. There’s a reason Apache kills its processes every 1000 or so requests.

b) Its too slow and memory hogging. I wrote a native php http client for spidering multiple websites, which although is fine for few connections, the c++ version I wrote was about 100 times faster taking a fraction of the memory usage, allowing many more connections at once.

Something such as this for a production website/hosting provider would just be too crazy.

But great work anyway, PHP rules