load common files at startup?

[Anon]

I have a set of functions which
every page uses. The files are large,
and I don't want to load them for every request using "include()". Is there a way to
preload a set of library files when each Apache child process
first starts up (I'm using Apache with mod_php), and thus have them available for
during handling of all page requests?

I have done this in AOLserver with Tcl files, and metahtml scripts as well, but don't know how to configure PHP to do this.

[[deleted]]

"Is there a way to
preload a set of library files when each Apache child process
first starts up (I'm using Apache with mod_php), and thus have them available for
during handling of all page requests?"

No, and I doubt that this is something you actually want to do. 75% of all apache children just handle images and non-php related stuff, so it would be a huge waste of resources to make every child load those PHP files.

PS how long does it take to parse those libraries anyway... 10ms? 20ms?

[hqmhqm]

There will be
approximately 100,000 lines of code.
I did a test which parsed some
dummy files with 100K lines of code,
defining functions typical of what
I would want to do. Parse time is 100 msecs.

The overhead of loading each child process
would be low - Apache child processes run
for typically hundreds of requests before
being recycled, and memory is cheap.

100 msecs is worst case, because all that
code may not have to be loaded every time,
some of it is module-specific.
But for a complex module, such as a knowledge management system, the module's core may easily grow to that. I am looking at porting the OpenACS
community system to PHP. It has dozens of modules, and the modules are extensible.

Do you have any suggestions how to
remove what will be 100 msecs of overhead
for each page request?

Also, for a multithreaded apache, obviously, this
stuff would only be loaded in once in the process.

[[deleted]]

There are special programs that can cache 'compiled' PHP scripts, that should take care of those 100ms loadtimes.

Note, this does not pre-load anything, it just keeps the compiled data in memory for easy-access on subsequent requests.

But be very carefull with any kind of caching and pre-loading; is will f*ck up sooner or later, you must restart/clean the cache after every change you make to the script, or things will get out of sync and start messing up bigtime.