[tdwg-tapir] TAPIRLink and memory

Richardson, Ben Ben.Richardson at dec.wa.gov.au
Fri Aug 3 05:09:50 CEST 2007


Roger

The fact that it didn't work for you means your provider has chosen to change the php.ini away from the defaults.

Cheers,
Ben

> -----Original Message-----
> From: tdwg-tapir-bounces at lists.tdwg.org
> [mailto:tdwg-tapir-bounces at lists.tdwg.org]On Behalf Of Roger Hyam
> Sent: Thursday, 2 August 2007 18:15
> To: Peter Neish
> Cc: tdwg-tapir at lists.tdwg.org
> Subject: Re: [tdwg-tapir] TAPIRLink and memory
> 
> 
> Thanks Peter,
> 
> I tried this but it didn't seem to work. The PHP documentation  
> suggests that it is changeable anywhere (even in a .htaccess file)  
> but it had no effect for me. Renato is correct that the deployments  
> are likely to have access to php.ini or know a man who does.
> 
> I have certainly changed script duration like this in the 
> past and it  
> has worked.
> 
> Anyhow I just moved over to a 'real' server instead for now.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Roger
> 
> 
> On 2 Aug 2007, at 01:18, Peter Neish wrote:
> 
> > Hi Renato and Roger,
> >
> > One thing that might be worth trying is including the command  
> > ini_set to override the php.ini setting for the memory limit e.g.  
> > ini_set('memory_limit',   '16M'); This has worked for me on a  
> > shared host to run a content management system that choked at the  
> > lower default value.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Peter
> >
> >>>> "Renato De Giovanni" <renato at cria.org.br> 2/08/07 2:21 >>>
> > Hi Roger,
> >
> > I do think it's worth adding your changes related to the "fopen"
> > workaround. Please don't hesitate.
> >
> > I should say that I'm actually surprised that TapirLink 
> requires only
> > 10M with such a complex RDF output model. I wonder how many records
> > were being returned in your request?
> >
> > I also don't have much experience with profiling, but I'm sure
> > there's room for improvements since I didn't pay much attention to
> > optimization. By the way, the main new feature for the next version
> > will be caching. I'm expecting significant improvements in
> > performance since query templates, output models, and response
> > structures will be all cached by default as serialized PHP. When
> > TapirLink can use cached content, I suppose this will also reduce
> > memory use. However, the first time it receives a particular output
> > model in a request, then it will require the same memory if we don't
> > make additional optimizations and if we want it to run below the 8M
> > limit.
> >
> > Anyway, I also wonder how many people and organizations will need to
> > run a TAPIR provider software under the conditions you described
> > (external ISP with such a low memory use limit). I still never heard
> > of any case in our community (maybe someone from GBIF could 
> give us a
> > better picture?).
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > --
> > Renato
> >
> > On 1 Aug 2007 at 14:11, Roger Hyam wrote:
> >
> >> Hi All
> >>
> >> I spent a couple of hours this morning adapting TAPIRLink 
> so that it
> >> uses a work around of fopen() because many ISPs will not support
> >> opening remote files (there is a php config option to stop it).
> >>
> >> Anyhow I got past this and found that my output model 
> still wouldn't
> >> run on my ISP account (Easyspace.com) but would run on my local
> >> machine. After a while I found that it was running out of memory.
> >>
> >> My ISP limits memory to 8meg per running script. That seems pretty
> >> tight until you imagine having a hundred scripts running
> >> simultaneously. It was the default setting prior to php 5.2 when it
> >> jumped to 128meg! This may explain why ISPs are very slow 
> to migrate
> >> to PHP5.*
> >>
> >> The TAPIRLink request was using almost 10meg under PHP 5.2 
> according
> >> to memory_get_peak_usage()  to parse the rather complex
> >> TaxonOccurrence output model. There is no peak usage method on
> >> earlier PHP versions. Ten meg seems quite reasonable 
> considering the
> >> cost of RAM these days - but there you have it.
> >>
> >> Anyhow I am nervous because this means that deployers might need to
> >> mess with php.ini to get scripts running which means shared servers
> >> may be problematic for deployments that use complex output models.
> >> Basically it won't run everywhere php is available but 
> only where php
> >> in a certain config is available. It also means that if 
> you are being
> >> crawled by a 10 threaded robot you will be using close to 100meg to
> >> service the requests plus memory allocation and deallocation etc.
> >>
> >> It is all seems pretty trivial if you have a newer machine and even
> >> more so if you install PHP 5.2+ on it but it does mean 
> that that old
> >> departmental webserver that has an old install of PHP on 
> may not run
> >> the RDF based output models out of the box.
> >>
> >> Never done any profiling with PHP and wouldn't like to get 
> into it. I
> >> guess Python will have a similar memory footprint as it is doing a
> >> similar job but the install scenario is different for 
> PyWrapper - you
> >> really need shell access.
> >>
> >> It may not be worth adding the fopen() work round if the deployment
> >> environment requires access to php.ini.
> >>
> >> Would be grateful for your thoughts on this.
> >>
> >> Roger
> >
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