PHP version 4 de-activated must move to PHP version 5

[bbad]

Our Shared site hosting provider appears to not be happy with us due to the amount of CPU/Mem we are taking up on our forum. He has stated that they will be shutting down the old outdated PHP version 4 of which we are using to support our Phpbb version 2.x forum.

I've only recently become one of the administrators of this site so I'm not 100% sure but it appears to me that we are running our own instance of php 4 and not sharing that across the platform. I don't have shell access but if I open a file browser, I see a php directory with the following subdirectories under it.

http://www.inselpix.com/images/jjones66 ... rowser.jpg

Is this not our own installation of PHP 4? If so, is there any other reason why he would de-activate that other than the fact that it is using resources on the shared platform? Are there any dependencies that PHP 4 has that PHP 5 doesn't?

[Thoul]

I'm not an expert at what PHP looks like installed on Unix, but that does appear to be a PHP install to me. Maybe if it's not optimized well, that is the source of the CPU and memory problems. He may also want to deactivate it due to fears of security issues or just not wanting to keep that old version of PHP around.

I can't see any reason your site would need it's own PHP install or a PHP 4 install. phpBB runs fine on PHP 5. Some of the modifications installed on the board, if they're really old or rely on register_globals being turned on, might have problems that need some attention to work correctly on PHP 5, though.

[Quiff Boy]

I'm not an expert at what PHP looks like installed on Unix, but that does appear to be a PHP install to me. Maybe if it's not optimized well, that is the source of the CPU and memory problems. He may also want to deactivate it due to fears of security issues or just not wanting to keep that old version of PHP around.

I can't see any reason your site would need it's own PHP install or a PHP 4 install. phpBB runs fine on PHP 5. Some of the modifications installed on the board, if they're really old or rely on register_globals being turned on, might have problems that need some attention to work correctly on PHP 5, though.

i can confirm that.

i run several phpBB2 forums on servers that run php v5 exclusively. never had a problem

[bbad]

So your both telling me that phpbb 2.x runs under PHP version 5? Can I just install version 5 and expect it to handle the version 2.x forum? Or, should I take this chance to upgrade to phpbb 3.x and then deal with any of the modification issues that might arise?

Thanks again for taking the time to answer these questions as I really do appreciate it.

[Quiff Boy]

yep. as far as i am aware php5 was designed to be backwards compatible with php4 (for the most part anyway)

this might help:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049 ... with-php-4

when i moved from a php4 to a php5 server i just re-uploaded my phpbb2 forum and it worked without any tweaking

it is possible that your hosting co have configured php's security settings quite tightly (eg: by turning register_globals off, disabling uploads, etc) but that kind of issue isnt related to the version of php, it's just a setting within php config, so you could have that with any version of php

so yeah, it should all work out of the box

although, to be honest, unless you've got a heavily modded phpbb2 forum (as i have) i'd take the opportunity to upgrade to phpbb3 - its got more features (for admins & users) & better built-in security...

i keep meaning to upgrade my phpbb2 forum to phpbb3, but it's got multiple themes and lots of mods, so will be quite a job

[Dogs and Things]

I confirm the same, my phpBB2 board runs fine on PHP5.2.

I also subscribe what Quiff Boy says about upgrading, although I don't have any plans for upgrading, I see no need, it's a heck of a job and I would lose functionality as not all the MODs I have installed are available for phpBB3.