I have downloaded the library browscap version 2.0 and added this code
$browscap = new Browscap('/tmp');
$browscap->doAutoUpdate = false;
$current_browser = $browscap->getBrowser();
The problem is when I am trying to get information about the current browser I'll have an error
Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 281 bytes) in ....phpbrowscap-2.0/src/phpbrowscap/Browscap.php on line 677
I do not want to increase the memory because I will be losing performance since my code is executed on every load page. So I tried debugging the code, I noticed that he is checking a lot of browsers. There is a lot of values in $tmp_user_agents and he is looping over this variable.
Is there anyway to get the functionality of this library without taking too much time? Or am I missing something in how it works
Well Browscap has a very very huge database and to load that (and iterate over it) on EVERY single page hit is of course not very efficient. The "ini" file I downloaded on their website has 7.5MB!!! That PHP runs out of memory is easy to understand. I would not recommend to use this library in this case.
I only checked their website and the resource file - not the code - but it seems as if they only look for the User-Agent String to verify the browser (which is very easy to fake by the way).
Have you ever looked at this PHP function: http://php.net/manual/de/function.get-browser.php Enough output for your needs?
I know this is a bit late to the party but the most efficient way to use it is to run a cron job on your server once a day to update the cache then in your code make it so it doenst update the cache when browscap is called.
In your site pages, run this code:
$browscap = new Browscap($cacheDir);
$browscap->doAutoUpdate = false;
$current_browser = $browscap->getBrowser();
On your server, create this script (i called it updateBrowscap.php), mine is in the same folder as browscap.php and the cache folder is a subfolder of it.
ini_set('memory_limit','1024M'); // allow 1GB for this script
set_time_limit(300); // change to 5 minutes for this script
// CREATE THIS CRON SCRIPT TO RUN ONCE PER DAY
// /usr/bin/php -q [full-path-to-this-file]/updateBrowscap.php > [full-path-to-this-file]/backup.log 2>&1
// Loads the class
require 'Browscap.php';
// The Browscap class is in the phpbrowscap namespace, so import it
use phpbrowscap\Browscap;
echo 'started: '.date("d-m-Y H:i:s", time()).PHP_EOL;
$path = dirname(__FILE__).'/cache';
$bc = new Browscap($path);
$bc->updateCache();
echo 'finished: '.date("d-m-Y H:i:s", time()).PHP_EOL;
My script would not run using the maximum of 512MB that the shared host would let me allocate so I have manually set it in this script to 1024MB.
Once I resolved the memory issue I was hit with a timeout issue so I have increased that from 30 seconds to 5 minutes just for this script.
I run it once a day around 3am.