[Xitami] Xitami2.4d9 and PHP4

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <3CCCAFF7.DFAA3DE1@astcomm.net>, Chris Olson writes:
>Chris Olson wrote: 
>Is there a way to optomize php for Xitami?  Or a loadable module similar to
>apache's?  Xitami isn't listed in the documentation for the current release
>of PHP4.

There's no loadable module for PHP for Xitami; in fact as far as I
recall the loadable module is only for Apache, and PHP was originally
written to run only with Apache.  A couple of years back I ran into one
of the authors of PHP at a conference, and we spoke briefly about the
idea of better integration between Xitami and PHP but no one has really
had time investigate it much further.

In the case of PHP and Xitami, the real killer under load is that PHP is 
being run as a CGI (a filter in Xitami is basically a CGI process in
disguise).  The overhead of forking and starting up the CGI process, and
dragging the output back in from the output files gets pretty noticable
when things get busy.  Apache/mod-php avoids all that overhead.

The obvious half way house is to turn PHP into a LRWP process attached
to Xitami, an idea that we played around with briefly some time ago but
never quite got completed.  If someone (who knows how to write C code)
is interested in playing with this idea let me know, and I'll try to
find the source code we'd thrown together.

>From your other message:
>* Xitami *still* doesn't write a PID file on UNIX platforms.  

I actually suspect that it's still the same version of Xitami as you
last noted this problem with.  We haven't noticed the source growing
new functions all by itself... :-)  (Yes, alas, the release versions of
Xitami have hardly changed in two years :-(  Even our internal versions
have changed all that much, although some of the libraries have.)

Contributions of source code to write a PID file much appreciated.  (I'd
find it handy too...)

>* The FTP server still won't handle hardly any load at all - I've found
>  I can't use it for serious FTP work.

This has been fairly widely noted.  We do recommend using another FTP
server if you're doing all that much with FTP.  The one in Xitami is
basically a very lightweight one for when you don't have/want to install
another.  I'd like to make it more robust myself, but simply haven't had
the time.

>But I can't get Xitami's server restart function to work every time 
>when throwing in a new domain or making other config changes that 
>require reload of the /usr/local/bin/xitami/defaults.cfg file. 

A number of people have noted this too.  I suspect there's just not 
quite enough checking of all the files going on.  But it's another
thing that we haven't been able to make enough time to investigate.

Ewen

-- 
Ewen McNeill, Technical Consultant, iMatix Corporation  www.imatix.com