The PHP community recently announced the release 5.4. So, here is my first question: Is this version finally thread safe?
I’ve read a lot of posts here and around on the Net about this hot topic (PHP tread safety) and I must admit that I’m a little bit confused.
As of today, my poor understanding on this subject is that the “thread safe” versions of PHP could be used on a multi threaded server such as Apache2-mpm-Worker (or IIS on Windows) when the none thread safe PHP versions should be used on a multi processes server such as Apache2-mpm-Prefork while it’s also my understanding that PHP by itself can’t start multiple threads.
I currently use PHP 5.3.10 on a Windows 7-64 system with WampServer2.2d-64 where phpinfo() states: Thread Safety : Enabled and Apache 2.2.21 Loaded modules: mod_php5 and also on another Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS (64 bit) system with PHP 5.3.2-1ubuntu4.14 where phpinfo() states Tread Safety: disabled and Apache 2.2.14 loaded Modules mod_php5. I thought using mod_php5 automatically loaded a thread safe version of PHP (but I guess I'm wrong).
So, here is my second question: Is PHP (any version) truly Thread Safe yes or no?
So my third question is: how to enable the thread safety option on my Ubuntu system?
And my last question on this subject is: is there a difference in execution times between the thread safe and non thread safe PHP/Apache versions?
PS: one additional question: How to install PHP 5.3.10 on Ubuntu since this package isn’t proposed by Synaptic?
