PHP5 alongside PHP4 on ASO

ASO lets us customers use both PHP4 and PHP5 with the help of a nifty little trick that lets us run PHP5 through FastCGI while still using PHP4 through mod_php4. Very very cool!

(Wow, second blog post today! I’m on a roll! ;-))

4 Responses to “PHP5 alongside PHP4 on ASO”

  1. ermau Says:

    :-O A roll indeed.

    Cool trick, I’m not sure I’d want them running on the seperate platforms like that, but I suppose it’s good that there’s a way to do it now :-)
    You could probably find a way to do it through an .htaccess and use whichever method you like for both rather then splitting them up.

  2. Chris Says:

    AFAIK, it’s not possible to run mod_php4 alongside mod_php5. The only option is to run it as CGI (or FastCGI, which is obviously a billion times better).

    I was thinking of the same thing, though. But it might not be a problem. Are there the same kind of issues with PHP5 as CGI as there were with PHP4 and CGI?

  3. ermau Says:

    I believe so, I don’t think anything has changed from that perspective. I mean, obviously the language is different, and the framework has changed (Zend Engine 2) but I think the problems are inherent to the way CGI works. I also could not have a clue.

    In any event, if it’s possible to say.. add types and import modules through an .htaccess, couldn’t you just detect say a .php4 or .php5 extension and load the appropriate module? Or even do that detection straight in the httpd.conf?

  4. Chris Says:

    I don’t think so. mod_* modules are loaded with Apache, you’d have to restart Apache every request to load a different PHP module.

    If it could have been done, I think many hosts would have done it already.

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