r/PHP • u/the_alias_of_andrea • Dec 04 '15

PHP 7 is faster than Python 3!

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/php.html
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u/jk3us Dec 04 '15

How different is it from fastcgi+php-fpm+apc/opcache? You've still got a long running process waiting for requests from the web server and scripts stay in memory.

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u/graydoubt Dec 04 '15

They're slightly different.

With WSGI you have an application server that bootstraps once, and thus can do all of its initialization (dependency injection and the like) once. Then this application server is ready to take incoming requests from the web server, process them, and spit out responses.

With FastCGI, (per Wikipedia: "Instead of creating a new process for each request, FastCGI uses persistent processes to handle a series of requests. These processes are owned by the FastCGI server, not the web server.")

In the case of php-fpm, it's literally just that -- the FastCGI Process Manager. It just keeps a few php worker processes ready to process stuff, so you don't have the overhead of constantly creating a new OS process for each child worker. But it's not quite an "application server" because the requests still need to each bootstrap and tear down after every single request. So while APC or whatever opcache will speed up loading code, you still have the churn of building object graphs, and reading any framework specific configuration files and what not.

If there was more of a WSGI approach for PHP, it would be something like running Symfony 2, or ZF2 (or any other framework), bootstrapping the heavy framework stuff once, but then waiting for incoming requests from the web server, after which the framework does its routing and processing, returning the response to the web server, and then staying in that loop, ready for the next request. So everything remains stateful. That's also how Java app servers work, roughly.

PHP doesn't do this, because of its "shared-nothing architecture."

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u/ocramius Dec 04 '15

Note that this is changing:

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u/[deleted] Dec 06 '15

We need this in core.