[FX.php List] FM Scripts vs. PHP

[Kevin Futter]

On 25/10/07 4:29 AM, "Joel Shapiro" <jsfmp at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Hi all
> 
> Looking for people's thoughts and experiences here.
> 
> In the FM PHP API webinar a couple weeks ago, Lance pushed the idea
> of running FM scripts from the PHP.
> 
> I know some people on this list have often said that it's preferable
> to do everything in PHP if possible.  Now I'm wondering why.  Have
> you seen degraded performance when running FM scripts?  Have you seen
> instability?  Are you PHP purists?  Do you know something that others
> don't know?
> 
> I asked Lance about how running FM scripts would affect performance,
> and he said running FM scripts is often no bigger a load on the
> server than processing solely through PHP, and that sometimes it can
> be faster.
> 
> Also, I had understood from this group (perhaps mistakenly) that the
> server puts other incoming hits 'on hold' while processing FM
> scripts, but Lance said that in fact you can even run additional FM
> scripts while one FM script is still executing.
> 
> Does whether or not the WPE is on the same machine as FMServer make
> any difference here?
> 
> Anybody have an opinion? ;-)
> 
> TIA,
> -Joel

I've always got an opinion. ;-)

My apprehension about running FM scripts from the web harks back to FMUv6,
when it definitely wasn't a good idea. However, many of the issues that made
it so *seem* to have been fixed since then (single-threaded execution for
example), but I haven't seen anything in black-and-white from the horse's
mouth about it.

Since many of our databases need to be simultaneously accessible from the
web and internal FM clients, we had concerns about data sync and integrity,
but these were tied to the limitations in transaction processing that
earlier versions possessed, so this is probably no longer an issue either.

Since we've moved to Server Advanced v8 and upgraded to better hardware,
reliability and performance have gone through the roof. I guess the relative
performance hits of PHP vs FM scripts depend on the respective hardware
they're running on, the network relationship they share, and how busy each
is.

I'd say for us, our FM server is far busier than our web server, so running
as much of the web-related FM data processing on PHP as possible would be
more beneficial for us than if it were the other way around.

Having said all that, I have on a couple of occasions needed to preprocess
data in FM via scripts before sending it to the web, and it would have been
far more difficult to do in PHP alone. I still can't get past the feeling
that it 'feels wrong' however, as it just doesn't seem like a clean data
processing model to me.

Kev

-- 
Kevin Futter
Webmaster, St. Bernard's College
http://www.sbc.melb.catholic.edu.au/


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