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Whether you’re an experienced PHP developer, a beginner just starting your journey, or an enthusiast interested in understanding more about the world of PHP, this is the place for you. We are a community dedicated to sharing knowledge, discussing new trends, and solving problems related to PHP.

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Welcome to /c/php! 🐘

  • Hey, I’ve came over from Reddit and thought I’ll introduce myself as well. As every programmer, I’ve started way too many pet projects and almost all of them are starving. In terms of framework, I prefer Yii2 over Laravel every day. I feel like Laravel provides you a dozen different (seemingly equally good) ways of doing something. You could say it’s lacking clarity or guidance for the developer.

    • Hey, welcome! Classic haha, I have far too many pet projects as well 😅

      And yeah agreed, it’s a bit dizzying to choose a Laravel “path”. Would probably be helpful to have a documentation page sort of like the Remix Stacks where they talk a little bit about which “path” to choose depending on app needs.

      • Docs is another topic I really don’t like about Laravel. Why don’t you have a simple API doc with available functions and their parameters instead of that blog-style documentation. And no, I don’t want to watch a video about how to use X, I want to know what functions I can call. Oh and don’t get me started on all their global “helper” functions.

  • Can anyone here help me understand persistent PDO connections?

    So I set up Patroni cluster, everything works as expected. But during the failover/switchover PHP remembers connections to the failed node. And I can’t figure out why. Reloading FPM is kind of PitA.

    I will use PgBouncer. But I still would like to know how PHP works with the persistent connections.

    • I haven’t used persistent connections although I have been tempted in the past. I believe, if you haven’t used it before, it might come with more trouble than it solves.

      As an alternative I could propose using amphp (or maybe react PHP) which will let you handle a pool of connections in a single long running process. But it’s a bigger change really, the more I think of it.

      • Yeah, but any ‘single server’ PHP defeats the purpose of PHP, so I’m not a huge fan.

        I’ve used them in the past, and they work great, until you have to switchover to another node.

        • Fair point.

          However why do you need persistent connections ? I am thinking that the growing rate of the connections should be very low as the instances increase, given that the queries are quick.

          • You lose about 5-6ms just connecting to the database. Keeping them open helps a lot.

            My goal is to write as simple code as possible, and everything else is super quick, just the connections aren’t handled well in PHP. Which is a shame.

            • It’s not that there isn’t the option, it’s just that I don’t know how to help you. MySQL has an option to reconnect, I suppose might be the same for postgres?

              The single running process that was so easily dismissed, could save tons of queries, for example! Sorry I keep thinking about that direction

              • Also, to work with persistent connections you will have to have a pool right? Because when you query from instance 1, the connection is not available until you consume the result set. Or is that only for MySQL?

                • Yes, you have a pool, but it’s handled by PDO somewhere, and I have no idea how to manipulate it. It just occured to me to try to open another resource before deallocating the first one.

                  If that doesn’t work, I will give PgBouncer a try. In case that won’t do what I need, I’ll just use pg_pconnect.

                  I love PHP so much, this is one of two issues I have with it.

              • Single process doesn’t save any queries, no idea what you mean.

                Persistent connections persist between requests just like in a single process. It’s just that pool handling is hidden in PDO.

                • Also how’s the setup? You setup for example 5 max children in fpm and 5 persistent connections? Per server? So your overall connections to the db server will be 5x your server instances?

                  If you setup 5 fpm children and less connections, one child will eventually reuse from another, but only when the connection is free (does not do a query for another process or pdo does not consume a resultset). If it tries to do a query at that time it will have to wait and it will block. This is my understanding. Also how you do transactions with persistent connections?

                  This has evolved into such an interesting conversation.

    • Honestly I don’t know much about this but I think this can occur because PHP (or more specifically, the PDO extension) isn’t necessarily aware of the health of the PostgreSQL node it’s connected to. From PHP’s perspective, it opened a connection, and unless explicitly told otherwise, it will assume the connection remains open. The Patroni switchover/failover is happening independently of PHP. PgBouncer is probably a good solution for this.

  • Hello, and thanks for creating this community! Sorry if I make grammar mistakes, I’m not a native speaker.

    I am a developer who has been working with PHP for a few years now, but I still consider myself a beginner because I’m the sole developer on my company and I have to learn and do all by myself and take all the development decisions. I’m actually relearning PHP and Laravel following more “formal” courses to cover all the bases that I’m surely lacking and then I’m planning to look for a job when I can work as part of a team to learn from other developers.

    Speaking about Laravel, I was looking through the fediverse for a Laravel community, as it was a different subreddit from the PHP one on Reddit. But being a small community for now, maybe it’s a good idea to keep everything together while the community starts growing? What do you think?

    • Solo dev? That’s a huge undertaking, especially having to learn by yourself! I think Laravel and Laracasts are excellent starting point to learn “good” PHP and it will definitely open up doors for your next job.

      And yes definitely, I think there could be a Laravel specific community!