Re: [Phpgroupware-users] I18N: why not gettext?!

[Chris Weiss]

>> >Why not using gettext instead of saving messages into the DB?! I think
>> >that gettext are more speedy way of doing this...
>> gettext uses text files, the database is faster.
>
>?! I've not understood how works the phpgroupware lang() function, but
>i think that for every string there's a lookup in the database, versus
>gettext that (even here, i think) load all strings in one time.
>

yes, but RDBMS's have some very advanced shared caching and indexing, so as the 
site
is being used, by say 100 people, you end up with only the parts of the lang 
table
that are actually being used in cache and all the db calls then operate out of
memory and indexed for speed.  While the gettext will call each lang call in a
different thread, load up a seperate copy of all the langs in memory each time 
for
each user and share nothing more than linux's built in file caching.

gettext is great for end user binaries, and it's an easy way for smaller php 
apps to
get lang support, but it's not very scalable.  Many things built into php 
aren't,
like the IMAP code we use, more than 150 users and it starts showing critical
performance problems that more hardware can't fix.  gettext will do the same.