php comet with quercus

Question

if i write the comet push with php but use this code on a java server via quercus, will that solve the one process per request problem that apache had and scale well with lot of users using my chat?

Answer 1

Well, Quercus runs on the (J)VM so it can run with other code that can start threads. But why do you need threads to do chat? You simply set the timeout on a vanilla PHP request to 0 (no timeout) and wait for there to be something to send back to the user.

That something else will be in response to someone else's request (ie A says "hello" which interrupts B's wait for something to happen). That doesn't require multithreading.

Also you could keep using Apache/PHP and do the above and instead connect to a Java (or other) service via something like XML RPC, which could wait forever. That server could do run multiple threads or do whatever it needs to.

Answer 2

Yes, Quercus solves the one process per request Apache bottleneck. However, you need to understand the possible bottlenecks of the JVM. In my opinion, though, you should write the service or app in C/C++ using something like libevent, in Erlang, in Google Go, or simply as a Java servlet simply for portability's sake.