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Ask HN: matrix multiplication within PHP?

3 points by dxjones ↗ HN
I am implementing a PHP-based web site that includes a simple recommender system. The key numerical calculation is a matrix multiplication. I am worried that doing this in PHP might be painfully slow. Does anyone else have experience doing numerical computations in PHP? I looked at writing my own PHP extension ( http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp/20/0/0 ) to implement matrix computations in C, ... but then it struck me someone else must have already encountered and solved this problem.

Any recommendations?

5 comments

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notaddicted
If I were doing this, first I would profile the code. It is hard to know if it is significant or not.
dxjones
Actually for small enough matrices (as you might imagine) the matrix multiplication in PHP is not horribly slow.
frisco
From my experience, numerical algorithms at all complicated in PHP tend to lead to major suckage. We use Thrift (http://incubator.apache.org/thrift/) to send the task to a daemon written in something more reasonable, most often either Python or C depending on required intensity. Works beautifully, few problems. Also, this lets you run the task asynchronously, so you can still return the page in N ms and then load the results on a lag: responsivity means a huge amount to users. Nothing's worse than the script dying from memory limits or timeouts and having the user get nothing (and PHP doesn't do threading).
dxjones
Thanks, I appreciate the link to Thrift. ... and I agree on the responsivity comment. I guess I'll look into setting up a daemon to my math in the background.