Posted by Jamie Alessio on 10/04/90 11:08

>>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
>
John,
I second Richard's opinion that there isn't any great reason to ditch
PHP in favor of Perl if you're already comfortable with PHP and
especially if you already have working code written in PHP. Are you
running these PHP scripts from the command line or via a web server? In
either case just do 'set_time_limit(0)' like Richard suggested and that
will eliminate the script timeout problems.

It's not really fair to say that PHP isn't a good tool for the job
because it is timing out. PHP's default setup includes a script timeout
because it is typically used to serve up web pages in times measured in
fractions of a second. So, for the vast majority of users something has
generally gone horribly wrong if a script is running for upwards of 30
seconds. Your usage of the language is outside what the "typical" user
does, so the default timeout settings are not appropriate for you. Perl
does not have any script timeout built in by default so it's not going
to have that problems. So, just because PHP's default settings don't
match your needs that does not mean that it isn't an appropriate tool
for the job.

The bigger factor to consider in your choice of language is the
libraries available to help get the job done quickly without writing a
ton of code yourself. In many cases Perl's CPAN library
(http://cpan.org) has more mature options for doing things like parsing
email so that might get you up and running faster than with PHP. That
said, there are some things in the PEAR library that might help. Take a
look at the Mail_Mime class (http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime).

- Jamie

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