* Chris Steipp wrote:
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:54 AM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
Local HTTP requests have pretty low overhead (1-2ms), but api.php suffers from high start-up costs (35-40ms). This is more an issue with api.php and the PHP execution model than with HTTP though, and might be improved in the future.
I would vote against local http requests, if we can avoid it. They can certainly be done safely if you design them correctly, but for example, you write a write a lua template, that calls an api that uses the same lua template that calls the api,... single request DoS!
(That's usually trivially addressed by, say, including a counter in some request header and refusing to serve requests where the recursion goes beyond some configured limit. And it is usually possible to do this at a very high level, so that should not be a major concern.)