So, finally a first beta of pecl_http 1.6 has been released.
This is the first version which supports libcurls multi socket API introduced in 7.16 through libevent.
Here's a not very impressive comparison of the performance of the traditional multi API vs. the new multi socket API:
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html
> 1.134667s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html
> 1.151088s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html
> 1.131867s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html -e
> 0.993878s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html -e
> 0.998832s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/empty.html -e
> 0.997121s
Above empty.html is, well, empty. The following test requests a 100k file:
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin
> 2.205190s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin
> 2.210525s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin
> 2.254281s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin -e
> 2.007220s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin -e
> 1.945564s
mike@honeybadger:~/build/php-5.2-debug$ cli
~/cvs/pecl/http/scripts/bench_select_vs_event.php
-u http://honeybadger/100k.bin -e
> 1.969575s
So, apparently time savings are not huge, but noticable.