[Xitami] Xitami2.4d9 and PHP4

[Chris Olson]

Ewen McNeill wrote:
> 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.

This gets pretty obvious when reading the docs for PHP :-)  Us Debian users
hardly ever read the docs unless we get something that doesn't work for some
reason - otherwise it's just apt-get install whatever, and it usually
works.  I had to do a little reading for this one - it's been a while since
I built custom apache servers, and the entire INSTALL file for PHP4 is
centered around how to build a static or dynamic module for apache.

> 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.

That's the same observation I had.
 
> 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.

My C skills are rusty to non-existant :-)  Otherwise I might spend some time
on this.  I think it would show some merit, though.  Xitami beats apache
hands down for serving static stuff - *WAY* less memory useage, and very
efficient on the cpu.  I've seen Xitami do some amazing things on a little
486/8MB machine that apache could send into a death spiral with no problem
:-)

> 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.)

I think the last version I tested was 2.4d7.  And you're right - I'm sure
contributions to an open source project would be appreciated!!!

> 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.

This is really minor for a unix box when you have ssh access, anyway.  But
I'll throw something out;  my workstation is Debian 3.0/2.4.17-k6
kernel/KDE2.2.2.  With Konqueror I can't get the admin panel to work at
all.  With Netscape 6.2 it's funky sometimes.  With Netscape 4.78 I've
actually gotten the server to restart a couple of times, but it's not
consistent.  Do you suppose it might have something to do with the browser
and Javascript compatibility?

Regards,
-- 
Chris Olson
System Administrator
AST Communications   http://www.astcomm.net