I see also it has an euphoria to c translator that makes it 3.7 times faster.
I think I’m going to download it and play around with it, I’ll let you know what I think

Perl is great but with so many dead links to what were booming sites before is sad. Perhaps a bad perception on my part but it seems to me that a lot of the open source projects seem to lack the wealth of community support they once had years ago.

No it is not like 1GB XML file, but more like 100 10MB XML Files, which would not be the problem if memory would not be leaked by PHP.

Some random thoughts;

Stream the XML – using something like a SAX API (not DOM which loads the entire document)

If you need to do some kind of calculation based on the entire document i.e. you need to see all the data to be able to produce the final result, you might consider storing intermediate values to file. At the far end of this way of thinking is Google’s MapReduce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce) – distribute the processing. The livejournal guys have something heading towards a Perl implementation of the same – see links here: http://del.icio.us/harryf/gearman . Another angle would be to consider an MMap based solution – in Perl check out http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/Cache-FastMmap/Cache/FastMmap.html for example

One advantage of Perl is it’s attracted the type of developers that like to solve this kind of problem (unlike PHP). Browse CPAN – Perl’s XML tools a also good. And demand Unicode support (some like Perl have it… other languages don’t)

http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/Cache-FastMmap/Cache/FastMmap.html

Using other language may mean you will have to duplicate certain portion of application functionality, leading to problems with maintainence.

But as soon as I started to write the first few lines of the deamon in PHP, I started to get some bad feelings about it (even if it would’ve fit for the task at hand and I was actually almost only using PHP at that time). I just realized that nobody was using PHP for anything that runs longer than a few seconds – and I just didn’t want to be the first one to hit the possible bugs.

I knew something would write about set_error_handler. Unfortunately it does not work.

Here is what documentation says:

The following error types cannot be handled with a user defined function: E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR, E_COMPILE_WARNING, and most of E_STRICT raised in the file where set_error_handler() is called.

Here is little example with problem I’ve mentioned:

< ?php

function myErrorHandler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline)
{
echo("Error !");
}

set_error_handler("myErrorHandler");

$a=false;

$a->method();
?>

Error handler does not help in this case.