I do not frequent these forums much so if this is redundant I apologize

I wondered if there are plans to port this new software to a PHP/MySQL version for higher traffic sites. The Perl version may be fine for some if they know mod_perl and have things tweaked for maximum speed but the "average" webmaster doesn't know this and PHP/MySQL is very easy and lightning fast.

I have always associated Gossamer Threads' products with quality and with the sale of WWWThreads to InfoPop there are a lot of people that would probably be interested in a PHP/MySQL version of this software instead of moving to an InfoPop product.

Any plans for this? If yes then is there a basic time frame? If not then why only a Perl version and is perhaps the high volume customer very few and far between?

Hi,

No, there are no immediate plans for a PHP version of the forum.

We have a lot of quality code invested in Perl. Things like our template system, SQL library, CGI module, Mail modules, etc. To try and reproduce that functionality in PHP would be a monumental task. We are creating a front end to Links SQL in PHP, as the front end is quite a bit simpler. If the response is great enough (i.e. enough new sales) then we may look at getting a new PHP developer in house, but until that time, it will be primairly perl.

I do realize the speed trade offs (and because it's a pet peeve, it's not the speed of php vs perl, but rather the fact that php is built into Apache, and perl is run as a cgi -- when perl is built in via mod_perl, perl is faster then php).

An alternative to those who can't use mod_perl is SpeedyCGI http://daemoninc.com/speedycgi/. Works wonders and all it requires is shell access, no integration to Apache and root access is not required.

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any other thoughts/questions.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Understandable.

You used to run WWWThreads here, what in your opinion would be the speed comparison between a PHP/MySQL version of that vs. both mod_perl and SpeedyCGI?

How much faster is mod_perl GossamerForum than the PHP based WWWThreads and is SpeedyCGI Gossamer Forum equal or better/worse than PHP based WWWThreads?

I know a concrte answer is not possible, just looking for ballpark

Hi,

I couldn't comment really, I have nothing against WWWThreads, it served us very well for the time we used it, it just wasn't "ours" (although their Mailer.pm was ;)

As for speed between language speed between mod_perl and PHP, perl is faster, however the amount isn't significant compared to how things are designed. For instance we had a problem with one of our queries in that it would take 2-3 seconds to run (it may have been only 0.5 seconds on smaller sites/faster computers and not been so noticeable). A system that didn't have this problem would be quite a bit faster regardless of perl/php.

I know this is probably a non-answer, but hey. =)

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.

Did UBB get rights to the Mailer.pm ??

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

I think he meant he modified it to use there Mailer.pm ???
Cheers,
Michael Bray

No, wwwthreads is/was? distributed with GT's Mailer module.