Why are you suspicious of PHP & Oracle performance?
What kind of performance problems are you encountering?
What is your target time limit for completing the processing each PHP page which accesses the Oracle database? For example, all pages must be fully rendered in less than 2 seconds, including all graphics.
Both Oracle and PHP are designed to scale up to handle very large user loads. The PHP OCI8 functions are just wrappers for the native Oracle OCI functions, so the overhead of calling them should be minimal. You should be able to get very reasonable response times as long as your tables are properly indexed, your SQL is reasonably optimized and your Oracle DBA is doing his/her job.
Connecting to Oracle when PHP is running as a CGI may slow down an application slightly. This is due to the fact that OCIPLogon() does not create persistent connections in CGI mode. This means that each Oracle logon effectively runs into the full overhead of connecting to the Oracle database. For this reason I do not recommend running a very busy website in CGI mode.
"regexp" stands for Regular Expression. For more information, check out the appropriate portions of the PHP Manual.
-- Michael
Darkstreak Consulting
www.darkstreak.com
