Posted by Richard Lynch on 01/08/05 00:35

symbulos partners wrote:
> Jason Barnett wrote:
>> exercise for myself, but then again I don't need to either. ;) This
>> would also be something that would be a great benefit to share with the
>> PHP community if you decide to compile this list of thread-safe
>> extensions.
>
> If we could share a bit of the effort with someone else, we would be
> available (February). Eventually we could host the page on our website, f
> necessary.
>
> We could have a simple php base page where people could flag libraries /
> sets of functions after checking. A simple table, in order to understand.
>
> We could manage it by e-mail eventually.

After checking?

There is *NO* exhaustive test to do, from everything I've ever heard...

Now if you want to come up with a test harness that claims to stress-test
some given code-base, with version numbers of all the under-lying code,
and hardware, come to think of it, and try to track the amount of testing
that has been done, and assign probability curves to the thread-safeness
of any given combination...

It ain't gonna be no simple table, though, really.

You might get somebody to say "Core PHP is Thread-safe"

They might even believe that.

They *might* even be right.

For their version of PHP.

On their OS.

Under that *version* of their OS.

With their hardware.

It don't mean a whole lot to anybody who doesn't have that *exact* same
setup.

You'd almost have to work out a list of all known variables, and then a
weighting system for (number-of-hours-run X
number-of-concurrent-processes) multiplied by the server load to give each
report a "score"

If I tell you it's "been fine" on my low-traffic servers, it don't mean
squat. If Rasmus tells you "PHP X + MySQL Y + OS Z == Good" on Yahoo,
that has some meaning, but not a whole lot if you change *any* of the
variables in the equation.

So then, you'd have a very large (and quite sparse, probably) matrix of
the probability that any given combination of every software package (and
hardware?) is thread-safe.

Not saying it's not a Good Idea, nor that you shouldn't be doing this: I
just want you to understand that you've severely under-estimated the scale
and scope of the problem to be addressed, and have a concomitant
simplisitic design going here.

Make it complex enough to be useful, and make it easy to search and report
on various combinations, it could be a real boon.

But if your site just says "PHP 4.1.3 + MySQL 3.23.4 == Good"... I'm not
going to put much faith in that for thread-safety.

But maybe I'm just a negative guy :-)

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