Posted by John Cage on 07/01/44 11:08

Hi there

I'm a great believer in using the right program for the right job. I
need some advice from people who use both PHP and Perl. I've long been
a fan of PHP and we use it for all our development work. However, I seem
to keep coming up with a bit of a problem when using PHP and I just
wanted to see if I was right or if there's something I'm not doing right.

Basically, we are bringing emails in from a client that all contain
large files - usually between 12mb and 15mb in size. This side of what
we are doing cannot be changed unfortunately. When we use PHP to parse
these files it often times out - I understand that we can flush data and
we call set_time_limit() occassionally to reset the time counter, but
PHP really seems to struggle. It just seems that every job I work on
that needs to parse large files or do something like web crawling that
we always come across these problems. A couple of people have said that
we should look at Perl because it is better at this kind of thing and
thats why I'd be interested in opinions about it from people who know -
ie those who regularly code in both

Appreciate any comments or suggestions or even if you can point me to
any sites that cover this as I looked and couldn't find any

thanks

Johnphp-general@lists.php.net

[Back to original message]