Wednesday, 31 January 2007

Better PHP Performance with Amfphp 1.9 beta 2

Patrick Mineault, in a post over his blog tells you about the beta 2 release of Amfphp 1.9. The highlight of this release is a C based AMF extension for PHP which makes it 100 per cent faster than using the PHP version of the AMFPHP library.

Based on Emanuele Ruffaldi's observations on creating a remoting implementation for C++ and a C extension for PHP doing AMF encoding and decoding, Patrick and his team has tested it, and found it to be stable and fast. He says that on sample data varying in size and complexity, it's fifty to two hundred times faster on pure encoding and decoding than the previous PHP solution. Though he confirms that encoding and decoding AMF is only one of the many things that Amfphp does, and the bottleneck may or may not be there depending on the size of the data. This extension will help when sending tons of complicated data over the wire, data like large recordsets and deeply nested object trees, he says.

He provides the information that you don’t need to install an extension to run the new version of Amfphp. The extension is an add-on to PHP that the new version of Amfphp will detect, load and use if it finds it, and revert to the original PHP-based encoding/decoding if it doesn't.