This is better for performance because these then don't need to be reevaluated every time they are called.
When encountering an unqualified function or constant reference, PHP will first try to locate a symbol in the current namespace by that name, and then fall back to the global namespace.
This short-circuits the check, which has substantial performance effects in some cases - in particular, ord(), chr() and strlen() show ~1500x faster calls when they are fully qualified.
However, this doesn't mean that PM is getting a massive amount faster. In real world terms, this translates to about 10-15% performance improvement.
But before anyone gets excited, you should know that the CodeOptimizer in the PreProcessor repo has been applying fully-qualified symbol optimizations to Jenkins builds for years, which is one of the reasons why Jenkins builds have better performance than home-built or source installations.
We're choosing to do this for the sake of future SafePHP integration and also to be able to get rid of the buggy CodeOptimizer, so that phar and source are more consistent.
this dates back to the days where PM used to kill threads to stop them. Today we're more civilized and ask it to stop nicely, so this isn't necessary anymore.
This now utilizes Snooze in order to have the server wake up to process RCON commands ondemand, similar to how the CommandReader thread operates. This is better for performance and response times.
This also makes a few other changes:
- RCON thread will now waste less CPU since it uses a blocking select() with timeout to read
- Following from that, IPC sockets are used to allow interrupting select() from the RCON thread.
- Multiple threads for RCON has been removed (this is entirely unnecessary, reading data from sockets is not CPU-intensive, and a single thread is easier to work with)
All plugins will need to bump the API if they want to use this.
NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT THE FINAL API 2.0.0 AND THAT THERE WILL BE MORE CHANGES.
To start updating, you might also want to read https://secure.php.net/manual/en/migration70.php and specifically https://secure.php.net/manual/en/migration70.incompatible.php
To compile PHP7 with some of the required dependencies, use https://gist.github.com/shoghicp/166ab26ce5cc7a390f45
ONLY LINUX IS TESTED, DO NOT ASK FOR OTHER PLATFORMS!
----- THIS VERSION IS NOT SUPPORTED -----
This version WILL crash randomly in unexpected places due to PHP7, pthreads, PocketMine or cosmic rays.
Handle with care, and store under direct sunlight for the best performance.
