OT: PHP BCMath slowness

[meepbear *]

>It would appear that GMP is  the best mechanism for bigint manipulation in 
>PHP.
BigInt seems to be about as speedy as GMP BTW but it's a non-standard 
external module.

>While it's not  bundled (as BCMath is), I can't see why a host wouldn't 
>offer GMP in  PHP.
What bundled means in PHP is that you don't need to download anything else 
should you want it, but you still have to choose to compile it into PHP 
itself. They further complicate the matter by having BCMath included by 
default in the Windows binary, but not in Linux and it appears (from my 
accounts and the few limited people that I asked) that hosts are likely not 
to have either BCMath or GMP as part of their install.

You might want to check your own accounts and ask more people if their host 
has it by default, but you can't really ever count on any module being 
available.