I’ve complained a lot when I worked with PHP about PHP’s terribly inefficient design; I’ve complained about it, just because it was PHP. The things I missed most in PHP, it seems, were actually there all along!
Behold shared memory and yet more IPC.
One reason PHP really sucked was that you need to load small data from and to databases or files if you want to share it between page views. The whole concept of handling a request per page view is ridiculous too, IMO.
With those two libraries however, PHP pages could be way more efficient.
I wonder why the big PHP software haven’t used it. Lets hope it isn’t portability.
I remember stories of vBulletin users using this extension, the problem is that is exactly that: an extension. Not enabled by default in PHP so very few hosts have it enabled. And indeed there’s a portability problem, as you can read on the PHP website.
An alternative to this would be stuff like memcached servers. Getting your shared server admin to install one of those would be a lot more trouble than enabling that extension.
The problem though, is that I intended to use this for PHP environments without a lot of extensions or mySQL. Guess I`ll have to rely on ye bad old flock and files.