PHPDeveloper.org

Mark Karpeles' Blog: proctitle: a new step for pinetd

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:12:17 -0600

If you've ever worked with forking processes in PHP, you know things can get a little difficult when you have more than one process going at a time. Identification can become a hassle, especially if you need to kill one off because of performance issues. If you've found yourself in this spot before, you might want to check out this update Mark Karpeles has made to his pinetd project to allow for naming of those forked processes.

Ever wanted to give meaningful names to your processes when you pcntl_fork() with PHP ? proctitle is the extension you're looking for! Adapted from bug report #29479 and code initially wrote by Midom for Wikipedia, the proctitle extension allows for a process to change its own displayed title in the system's process list.

The extension (seen in action here) is an interface for making different sorts of daemons, including the ability to give them names. You can check out the project here.

Lukas Smith's Blog: Persistent connections with MSSQL

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:01:26 -0600

Lukas Smith is looking for a little help on a strange problem he's seeing connecting to a SQL Server with persistent connections:

We are connecting to SQL Server via mssql_pconnect(). MaxChilds is set to 256 and we are only establishing one connection per request. So as a result I am expecting a maximum of 256 established connections. A client went into production yesterday and due to a missing index the server ended up being insanely loaded, as the queries started to block each other. The sysadmin checked the state of things via netstat and found that there were close to 500 tcp connections to the SQL Server. What gives?

He checked FreeTDS and the MaxRequestsPerChild settings to ensure that nothing there could have caused the problem, but hasn't found any hints so far. If he can't solve it right away, he also wonders if there's a way to kill idle connections if they're not used in a certain amount of time.

There's already one connect that mentions a similar issue but with Oracle connections, also on RHEL, but no definitive answers so far.

DevShed: Developing an Extensible TCP Server with Sockets in PHP

Tue, 30 May 2006 17:58:33 -0500

Devshed has posted part two in their series of "handling sockets in PHP", this time, with a focus on the creation of a TCP server.

Are you interested in learning how to manipulate low-level sockets in PHP? Your search has finished. This is the second part of the series "Handling sockets in PHP," and hopefully you'll find in it valuable material regarding the creation and manipulation of sockets with PHP, in conjunction with numerous illustrative hands-on examples that will help you build socket servers in a few easy steps.

The tutorial walks you through the simple process, looking back at the simple version they made before, looking forward at expaning it to handle multiple client requests, and creating a "socket server" class to automatically handle the creation of the socket.