[Envolution-devel] Instantiate Smarty By Reference

[Roger R. <rog...@as...>]

Hello Dev Team,

This is my first post so please don't yell at me for mentioning 
something that has been mentioned before or for posting something that 
may not be appropriate for this list.  I am a regular poster to PostNuke 
and Xaraya Dev lists and only want to better my Module :)

Also, I understand that you're taking over the development of Cal-Zone 
(or at least have adopted that project as your own) so this may help 
that project in the future as well.  I fully support Cal-Zone and have 
had many great conversations with Craig during its development.  I feel 
it's a wonderful calendar and wish it much success.  I also hope to 
learn from any advances You make with it as I hope my advances will help 
you.

That said, on with the post :

I develop the PostCalendar module and one particular beta tester keeps 
reporting the following:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to 
allocate 46080 bytes) in 
/home/testsite/htdocs/modules/PostCalendar/XXXXXXX on line XXX

I've done everything I can to limit the amount of Memory my calendar 
uses and have not received any reports from users of PostNuke that 
memory problems Exist.

One of the things I have done to alleviate the memory stress was to 
instantiate my pcSmarty class by reference using $tpl =& new pcSmarty 
throughout my code.

I am thinking that it might be possible to alleviate more memory usage 
problems by having your eNvolution code also instantiate Smarty using 
references.

This will allow the code to use the Smarty class as a reference rather 
than making a COPY of Smarty.  Smarty is written in such a way that 
creating a new object by reference should not cause any problems as the 
Smarty doc itself says "If you need to create more than one Smarty 
object, then you're not using Smarty correctly."

I've noticed that the class is instantiated a number of times throughout 
the code all using $foo = new Smarty;

Using $foo =& new Smarty will most likely help with the problem I 
described above regarding memory usage.

I took my local copy of eNvolution 1.1.0 that i use to test the 
PostCalendar code and found all the instances where smarty was 
instantiated and changed those instances to use references. From what I 
can tell, no adverse affects became of it.

also... you can reference this document at the main php site for more 
information on references

http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.references.whatdo.php

Anyway - I'd love to hear your thoughts on it as you're the core devs of 
eNvolution and have much more knowledge of the code base at this time 
than I do.

I'd also like to say that your work has been wonderful and has made the 
PostNuke and Xaraya teams FINALLY realize how important layout is.  Keep 
up the good work and keep pushing the threshold.

I wish you all the best in your future coding endeavors.

Thanks,
Roger Raymond
PostCalendar Dev