Thread: Postgres and AOLServer

Does anybody know if PHP would do connection pooling to Postgres as a
module under AOLServer?

If it would, does anyone have any idea how to configure AOLServer to
connect with pools to Postgres?

My thinking was that the threaded nature of AS would enable PHP to
do connection pooling.

Is it not the webserver that does the actual connection to the database
rather than any module such as PHP?

Thanks.

gh

GH wrote:
> Does anybody know if PHP would do connection pooling to Postgres as a
> module under AOLServer?

From the rough read of the module, no. It's like using a Perl CGI,
where you'd create, and then destroy, the connection.

> If it would, does anyone have any idea how to configure AOLServer to
> connect with pools to Postgres?

Blisteringly easy. If you've struggled with a single db migration
in PHP, you'll wonder what went wrong in their design. They have
beautiful logic abstracting the db connection _away_ from the
display logic, from the scripts themselves.

> My thinking was that the threaded nature of AS would enable PHP to
> do connection pooling.

Nope. It doesn't glue in that deeply, instead, you'd be creating tons
of little PHP threads... same problem as apache+PHP.

> Is it not the webserver that does the actual connection to the database
> rather than any module such as PHP?

This depends. AOLserver can do it. Or AOLserver can hand it off to
Perl, to PHP, to whatever, and let that code do it. If AOLserver
does it on it's own, it manages it all. Otherwise, it's like using
Perl CGI connections... no persistance, no pool.

-Bop

--
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which is currently in MacOS land.  Your bopping may vary.

Ron Chmara wrote:
>
[. . .]
> > My thinking was that the threaded nature of AS would enable PHP to
> > do connection pooling.
>
> Nope. It doesn't glue in that deeply, [. . .]

Correct, here's what the PHP manual says about persistent connections
and multithreaded webservers such as AOLServer (although it doesn't
mention it explicitly):

------------------------------ snip ------------------------------
The last method is to use PHP as a plug-in for a multithreaded web
server. Currently this is only theoretical -- PHP does not yet work as a
plug-in for any multithreaded web servers. Work is progressing on
support for ISAPI, WSAPI, and NSAPI (on Windows), which will all allow
PHP to be used as a plug-in on multithreaded servers like Netscape
FastTrack, Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS), and O'Reilly's
WebSite Pro. When this happens, the behavior will be essentially the
same as for the multiprocess model described before.
------------------------------ snap ------------------------------

I'm getting worried about this connection pooling issue now too, being a
PosgreSQL/PHP person. I haven't run into the problem yet but am
currently building the biggest site I've ever done  . . . what I don't
really get about it: Since you will have one db connection per Apache
process at the most, the issue depends on whether _Apache_ reuses its
child processes; if those are sitting around idly whilst new ones are
being created, then there's something wrong with the way Apache behaves
or is configured(!).

- Frank