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Asked: 2026-05-15T11:37:00+00:00

I need to make calls from webpage to external library written in C++ and

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I need to make calls from webpage to external library written in C++ and display the result. Platform is Linux, Apache, PHP.

My current idea is to use PHP service which will call my library/program. I found that there are two possible ways to do this:
1) use PHP ‘exec’ function
2) write PHP extension

I am curious what works more effective? Faster? Less load the server?

I will probably need to do 4 calls per second, so I want to be as optimal as possible.

P.S. If you are aware of some other (more effective) way of calling C++ library or program from webpage, please let me know.

Thanks a lot,
Robusta

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    An extension is theoretically faster because it avoids the overhead of creating a new process. It’s also a “cleaner” solution (no awkward program arguments escaping; you are able to parse arbitrary PHP values such as objects instead of only strings, etc.).

    However, if you already have a command line program that uses that library, it will be easier for you to just execute it instead of writing an extension.

    Note that if you only make 4 calls per second, performance-wise it’s indifferent which method you use, unless your library requires expensive initialization that can be avoided by having persistent (cross-request) state stored in a PHP extension.

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