Performance gain of PHP and C

Nexweb

Hello everybody,

I have some questions for you guys. We are about to rebuild a great project in PHP and I would like to know if we should consider writting some code in C to gain some preformance on our website.

I come from an Asp environment and I used to write DLL in C++ to gain some performance on the server side. Does this apply to PHP also? Anybody with good or bad experience with that architecture?

Any websites I can used to see how my PHP uses my C objects?

Thanks for you help

dave420

I've never made any myself, but PHP (being open-source) has lots of information on how to compile your own extensions from C. The performance increase would be noticeable, as compiled code has a better chance of running fast compared to interpreted code. There is a lot of information out there about this, so google might be your best bet 😉

Also, if you can't achieve what you want using custom extensions, as PHP is open source you can just change the language yourself 🙂 Bit different from ASP... 😉

onion2k

Originally posted by dave420
The performance increase would be noticeable, as compiled code has a better chance of running fast compared to interpreted code.

Depends on the way the server is setup, but you can save a pre-compiled version of the code by using the Zend optimizer.. so technically the compiled vs intepretted arguement is a bit redundant..

yelvington

Or the increase might not be noticable at all. Many applications are i/o bound, not cpu-bound.

And keep in mind that PHP has many high-level functions that do complex things and already are implemented in C.

Before you set about to optimize your code, make sure you understand where it's spending time.

Nexweb

Thank you guys for the info.

We are about to buy some Zend Optimizer licenses, so I guess I will need to do some more bench mark test with C vs PHP Optimized. On our demo license, I notice almost 50% gain in performance with the optimizer 🙂, just with the PHP code.

If anybody has good references about the integration of C and PHP , I would still appreciate, I look on google, but I didn't really find what I was looking for.

Thanks

superwormy

C or C++ compiled code will be much faster than interpreted PHP, BUT, chances are, for a web application, you're not going to need the extra speed that you'd gain from C.

If you really do, and you're really really positively sure you do, I would look into the Zend Performance Suite before I looked into anything else. It has built-in caching and stores your compiled PHP automagically and everything, and there is a signifigant speed increase using it.

Nexweb

True for the Zend Performance Suite. With the optimizer, we pretty much double the performance of our servers.

I think the way I will do this is that job that run in background ( take some database info and reorganized it) I will make them in C, but anything else that is related to output anything to the browser, I will keep it in PHP, including the MySql connection.

Anybody ever had problem with the Performance suite that I should know about?