Fedora's PHP binary pretty slow for CGI

[David Garamond]

I am still running RH73 with PHP packages from Troels Arvin:

  http://rpms.troels.arvin.dk/

The packages are now unmaintained and they are stuck at PHP 4.2.2. Today 
I thought I'd try building FC2's PHP on RH73. Not exactly a 
straightforward process, but after tweaking the spec file a bit and 
upgrading some libraries it managed to build.

I see that the PHP binary produced by Fedora's package is relatively fat 
(+- 3MB in size, with most PHP extensions built into the binary). In 
contrast, Troels' PHP binary is much more slim (+- 1MB in size, most PHP 
extensions is separated).

The problem is, Fedora's PHP binary adds a big overhead when being used 
in CGI application. Just running "php -q" would take +- 0.14 sec. on my 
system, where Troels' binary only takes +- 0.017s. Most of the overhead 
is due to loading the many shared libraries.

Perhaps it can be slimmed down a bit? 0.14s overhead is too much I 
think. In comparison, "perl -v" only took 0.015s and "ruby -v" took 0.017s.

-- 
dave