[PHP4BETA] Wacky Performance Problem w/ Windows

First, lets keep this on php-windows@ - it's clearly the correct forum...

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Hmm. Well, that makes a little more sense, at least. I still don't pretend to
> understand why there would be such performance problems under Win32. I do see
> some Win32-specific code in main.c (UpdateIniFromRegistry)... is the registry
> really that slow under Windows? Even if it were, I don't see any reason why
> plain HTML would be that much slower than PHP. I guess this would have to be
> a bug in the Zend compiler?

Joel,

How did you perform the benchmarks? I've never performed benchmarks on
large HTML files under Windows, but I must say your results are very
surprising. I can't think of any reason why PHP code blocks should
execute quicker than flat HTML blocks (quite on the contrary).

There are two big differences between the Win32 implementation of PHP, and
the (common) UNIX one:

- The Win32 implementation is multithreaded. This poses some overhead.
- The Win32 implementation uses a C++ lexical scanner, as opposed to a C
lexical scanner that the UNIX one uses.

While both of the above reduce the speed of PHP under Windows, I find it
hard to believe it'll be in more than a couple of percents, definitely not
in orders of magnitude, and it doesn't give any explanation on why HTML
blocks are apparently slower than PHP blocks.

Please let me know how you performed the benchmarks; We'll do some as
well.

Zeev


--
Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
http://www.zend.com/