There's an experimental PHP extension module which wraps the ICU library's
normalization functions. This is *MUCH* faster than doing this work in pure
PHP code. This is at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/extensions/normal.git;a=summary.
-It is known to work with PHP 4.3.8 and 5.0.2 on Linux/x86 but hasn't
-been thoroughly tested on other configurations.
+It is used by the WMF, which currently runs PHP 5.3.10 on Linux. It hasn't been
+thoroughly tested on other configurations, but may work.
If the php_normal.so module is loaded in php.ini, the normalization functions
will automatically use it. If you can't (or don't want to) load it in php.ini,