Using comet with PHP?

ryeguy_49018 0
Viewed 54728

I was thinking of implementing real time chat using a PHP backend, but I ran across this comment on a site discussing comet:

My understanding is that PHP is a terrible language for Comet, because Comet requires you to keep a persistent connection open to each browser client. Using mod_php this means tying up an Apache child full-time for each client which doesn’t scale at all. The people I know doing Comet stuff are mostly using Twisted Python which is designed to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous connections.

Is this true? Or is it something that can be configured around?

comet php
11 Answers
vartec_607110

I'm having a similar issue. One option I'm finding interesting is to use an existing Comet server, like cometd-java or cometd-python, as the core message hub. Your PHP code is then just a client to the Comet server -- it can post or read messages from channels, just like other clients.

There's an interesting code snippet linked here: http://morglog.org/?p=22=1 that implements part of this method (although there are bits of debug code spread around, too).

user_957340

You'll have a hard time implementing comet in PHP, just because of it's inherent single-threaded-ness.

Check out Websync On-Demand - the service lets you integrate PHP via server-side publishing, offloading the heavy concurrent connection stuff, and will let you create a real-time chat app in no time.

user_253300

I think this is more an issue that having a lot of apache threads running all the time is a problem. That will existing with any language if it works via apache in the same way as PHP (usually) does.

benlumley_391610
Related