The POSIX shared memory support should be unnecessary for the Java implementation - I think its required due to the multiprocess nature of Apache/mod_php? Also since you can call Java code from PHP for this implementation, finding or writing equivalent Java libraries for the missing pieces should not be that difficult. Plus there is always JNI - you can, for example wrap around libcurl in Java API and call the underlying libcurl using JNI?

It's not exactly plug-in replacement if you use a lot of that stuff - but it should be still worthwhile to invest in creating replacements for that stuff as a one time thing.

Here is the URL in case people are interested in checking this out - http://www.caucho.com/resin-4.0/doc/quercus.xtp .
In summary:
It is OpenSource, 100% Java and it brings all the advantages of using a JVM to PHP - performance (JIT), Safety, Scalability (clustering/load balancing), quality tools (Development, Profilers). One can use most of the Java technologies in PHP to ease development even further - XA Transactions, JNDI, Connection pooling, object caching for example.

Besides, improving performance of this pure Java PHP implementation ought to be easier than improving the PHP runtime. (Java6 onwards the available tools to debug and optimize Java applications have made significant progress. jmap/jhat , easy heap dumps on OutOfMemory, Object Query Language etc. already come bundled with the JVM and then there are Eclipse and NetBeans GUI profilers.)

Also worth checking out Dr. Cliff Click's extensive Java vs. C performance blog post - http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2009/09/java-vs-c-performance-again.html .

Caucho Resin has a mostly pluggable replacement for PHP which is written in Java. It adds web friendly features to PHP like distributed sessions and load balancing. Given the JVM JIT is already plenty fast and the benchmarks show that Java/PHP beats regular PHP handily - I wonder if Facebook considered using it at some point.

Yeah, I understand that, but my point was that it is too early to blame Windows. For one thing most OSes provide the reasonable number of required services like failover, decent CPU scheduler and the other most used features. For second, the previous poster and yourself both assume that the trading application suffered from the OS not providing some feature. That is not proved yet. There is no reasonable doubt to assume that would be the case. You are talking about special purpose applications (real time for e.g.) that require special OS features that are not present in commodity OSes and I don't know that the trading application in such and application. If it was then whoever chose general purpose OS like Windows was not thinking and the fact that it ran so long is an indicator that it wasn't the case. So without having any knowledge that the trading application lacked the OS support for some special feature it required from Windows - it is too early and unreasonable to blame Windows.

What? Are you serious? You actually made the same point I did - except that you made it by _NOT_ mentioning the OS! The rest of what you wrote is complete BS - sorry. BS not on its own but BS to the current context. You don't want unhappy traders - sure, but how the fuck is the OS directly responsible to unhappy traders? At least make some points to clarify may be? Or would that be too much to ask for?

Mod parent up. There is a refreshing amount of reality in the parent's post.

The OS is irrelevant - every modern server OS performs well enough to support sanely written software and sanely designed infrastructure. Only the people living in the past and the ones having no clue will argue otherwise.

That is not to say any OS is without its quirks and differences. Part of writing software for a platform is also to understand and work around the platform's limitations, quirks or "ways" - and this obviously applies to every platform. (You don't go over committing memory on Linux and expect it will work as long as malloc() doesn't return NULL - you can do that on Solaris. Similarly I am sure there are things you can do on Linux but not on Solaris etc.) Unfortunately many programmers only know the programming language and its libraries - not the platform or even general OS concepts or scalability for that matter.

The suits are trigger happy - if some thing doesn't work for a time, they will just ask to get rid of it and use other product, redesign the whole thing or do something equally idiotic. I am sure the TradElect system can be fixed to run on Windows 2003 well enough - but the people who make decisions will not make an attempt to locate competent Architects and Programmers that can actually fix it.

[ This reminds me of a situation where we were asked to throw away a complete system because it wasn't able to handle high volumes and caused downtime - as it turned out, adding network timeouts and retries to the right places along with horizontal scaling resolved the issue completely satisfactorily and we are still running the same system 3 years later]

Did not make a noticeable difference on a non-SSD 15" MacBook Pro in my very unscientific but very typical usage test - I guess the hardware designers were sane - if you are not using the speed you don't pay for it. I have seen Intel controller documents that sort of state that 0.4w more power consumed by 3Gbps capable controllers (compared to 1.5Gbps ones) but that is Intel controller specific and the controller in the new MBP is nVidia's.
I am seeing some increased warmth near the speakers after the update under regular use but I classify that under "General Post Update Weirdness" not caused by anything specific :)

I always thought the US of A was the most rebellion if not a 100% accepting of all when it comes to choosing what one wants to do their hands. I still think it is easier to live a happy life in the US opening a bike repair shop than it is back in my home country.
In fact where I come from I always hated parents dictating children what to do and society belittling young people who chose to do something different. Heck even today most parents won't marry their daughter to a person who has got a bike repair shop - they would much rather marry her to a dim with with an IT job ;)
I guess the problem is with pandemic illogical comparison - that guy is in a call center job and earns lots of money just sitting and you dirty your hands every day and struggle to make a living. The flaw of course being that it totally ignores the possibility that I can be happier, healthier and more productive doing bike repair and be able to sustain a good income as opposed to the possibility that the call center worker might have fissures sitting on desk all day and may never "achieve" anything in life - notice I said these are possibilities.
But I guess the so called "society" is same every where you go - children need to be raised to not only do what makes them happy and the most productive but also develop the right skills and mindset to do it.

Intel managed to sell me the "Extreme" Graphics i740 back then and when I look back it just me sad again.

Of course today I would not buy an Intel graphics card even if they named it Larrabee - oh wait they already did?