Document alternative gRPC extension for ZTS/FrankenPHP environments

[BSN4]

The official ext-grpc has several known issues in threaded PHP environments:

• ZTS/TSRM segfaults — the C gRPC core's event_engine threads call _emalloc without TSRM context, causing SIGSEGV on FrankenPHP and other ZTS SAPIs (grpc#41526, frankenphp#2235)
• OpenSSL/BoringSSL conflicts — the bundled BoringSSL collides with PHP's OpenSSL, breaking ext-curl and other extensions
• Mutex deadlocks on PHP 8.5 (grpc#41526)
• Stack overflow regression in grpc 1.69 (#8015)

grpc-php-rs is a drop-in replacement that solves these issues. It uses the same Grpc\ namespace API, so no code changes are needed for google-cloud-php users.

pie install bsn4/grpc

Pre-built binaries for PHP 8.2–8.5, Linux (x86_64/ARM64, NTS/ZTS) and macOS ARM64.

Would it be useful to mention this as an alternative in GRPC.md for users running into these issues?

[bshaffer]

If you haven't already, file this issue over at https://github.com/grpc/grpc as well

[pentium10]

@bshaffer we started running today this in production with heavy Datastore/Bigquery and Cloud Logging on PHP8.5, and it works flawlessly.
Also it's not memory leaking like the more official grpc version.

The last part is the @BSN4 version

latency improved slightly as well

cpu usage is better as well

[bshaffer]

For us to add this to our READMEs, we would need the project to be stable (it's currently on v0.1.7) and we would need to integrate it fully into our test suite.

These markdown files (README.md and GRPC.md) deploy to cloud.google.com as part of our reference documentation, so it's important we meet the criteria above before recommending a third party library.

[bshaffer]

As I've stated the requirements for this, I am going to close this issue for now.