PHP4 + Apache2 = Experimental

[Joe Orton]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 08:20:30PM -0400, Marc Richards wrote:
> I have posted questions to the PHP development list in the past and the main
> reason that they gave for it still being experimental was that PHP as a
> whole is not thread-safe and therefore if one of the extensions or libraries
> was buggy and not thread-safe it could take down the whole apache instance.

It's important to recognize that the issue about thread-safety is *not*
an argument about whether PHP works with Apache 2.0 or not.

Using the default httpd binary in 2.0 (and that we ship), there are no
thread-safety issues in PHP, period.  From the thread-safety
perspective, Apache 2.0 is absolutely no different from 1.3 in this
configuration.

We provide an alternative httpd binary, /usr/sbin/httpd.worker, which
uses a thread-based model for processing requests: you can't use PHP
with this binary without recompiling it, and you probably wouldn't want
to even if you did.

It's not entirely clear why the PHP site has a "don't use PHP with
Apache 2.0 on production sites" message.  There is no message like that
on the pages about integrating PHP with any of the Windows servers like
Xitami, IIS etc, and I am confident those configurations get a lot less
development, attention and production testing than PHP on Apache 2.0.  

We've done a bunch of testing of 2.0 with PHP and the other modules; be
assured we wouldn't ship it if we didn't think it was production ready.  
A number of (mostly minor) PHP/Apache 2.0 integration issues have been
fixed in our errata updates; none of these were reliability or stability
issues.

Regards,

joe