phar gets a major speed boost with version 1.2.1

Wednesday, August 29. 2007

phar gets a major speed boost with version 1.2.1

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

This version of phar fixes a number of issues as documented in my last blog post, as well as a quite few issues that Marcus fixed in relation to setting the bootstrap stub, using phar's phar.extract_list INI parameter with an apache module and others (full list here).

In addition, I ran callgrind on the thing and found a few places it could use some trimming of the fat, and was able to cut down the number of stream operations by a factor of 2x when using phar in the most common use case, reading uncompressed files. In addition, I cut another 2x for phars that have an MD5 or SHA1 signature.

This is quite a good release, looking forward to hearing your stories of using it.

Posted by Greg Beaver in PHP at 21:15 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Yep, a real world example would really help (somthing else than that phpmyadmin package). I still don't get it.

What's the point of creating yet another non-standard me-too package format? Why isn't the internal structure just PKZIP?

Having MD5 or SHA1 hash values is no more a "signature" than ZIPs CRC32. The cryptic internal byte-length format only adds obscurity, and doesn't make it tamper-safe, faster, more useful or anything else. What is the selling point of phar over zip:// exactly? The bootstrap code could work as well with a ZIP archive - wouldn't it?

#1 mario on 2007-08-30 10:44 (Reply)

unlike .zip, you can run phar archives directly as if they were php files. In other words, if you renamed "blah.phar" to "blah.php" you could access it via

php blah.php

or as

http://www.example.com/blah.php

and it would work just fine. This is not possible with .zip format.

Also, you are incorrect about speed - the format is much faster than alternatives.

a .zip archive with a tacked on bootstrap would need to strip the bootstrap prior to accessing it, necessitating much more work, and the necessary performance loss. In addition, this would not work with any standard .zip tools, negating the benefits of using .zip

#1.1 Greg Beaver on 2007-09-21 15:03 (Reply)

this is definately a good release. I made a dutch manual at the dutch learnwiki
thanx http://www.leerwiki.nl">MD5

#2 Domein (Homepage) on 2008-01-10 06:53 (Reply)

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