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Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2025 21:50:54 +0300
Message-ID: <CAMW7n8BWvf-bE6g7A_0vDW1Lf8hhTm-zuyNEY23DA0biNS-YSA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP True Async RFC Stage 4
To: Deleu <deleugyn@gmail.com>
Cc: Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com>, php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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From: edmond.ht@gmail.com (Edmond Dantes)

Hi.
>>  But for the critical parts of a system that requires optimization of th=
e execution duration

If you want to improve performance, you need to optimize SQL queries,
not try to execute them in parallel. This can bring down the entire
database (like it did today :) )

There are only a few patterns where multiple asynchronous queries can
actually be useful. Hedged Requests for example. Question: how often
have you seen this pattern in PHP FPM applications? Probably never :)
I know it.

Right now, there are only two significant PHP frameworks that are
ready for stateful execution. And only one of them supports
asynchronous stateful execution. This situation is caused by several
reasons, and one of them is whether or not the language itself
provides support for it.

Why is stateful execution the primary environment for async? Because
async applications are servers. And FPM is not a client-server
application. It's a plugin for a server. For a very long time, PHP was
essentially just a plugin for a web server. And a client-server
application differs from a plugin in that it starts up and processes
data streams while staying in memory. Such a process has far more use
cases for async than a process that is born and dies immediately. This
is the distinction I=E2=80=99m referring to.

As for the issue with frameworks: a project with several tens of
thousands of lines of code was adapted for Swoole in 2=E2=80=933 weeks. It
didn=E2=80=99t work perfectly, sometimes it would hang, but to say that it =
was
really difficult=E2=80=A6 no, it wasn=E2=80=99t. Yes, there is a problem, y=
es, there
are global states in places. But if the code was written with at least
some respect for SOLID principles, this can be solved using the
Context pattern. And in reality, there isn=E2=80=99t that much work involve=
d,
provided the abstractions were written reasonably well.

> If you have a report that executes 3 queries and each query averages betw=
een 4 to 5 seconds,
If an SQL query takes 3...5 seconds to execute, just find another developer=
 :)

Developers of network applications (I=E2=80=99m not talking about PHP) have
accumulated a lot of optimization experience over many years of trial
and error =E2=80=94 everything has long been known. Swoole, for example, ha=
s a
huge amount of experience, having essentially made the classic R/W
worker architecture a standard in its ecosystem.

Of course, you might say that there are simple websites for which FPM
is sufficient. But over the last two years, even for simple sites,
there=E2=80=99s TypeScript =E2=80=94 and although its ecosystem may be weak=
er, the
language may be more complex for some people, and its performance
slightly worse =E2=80=94 it comes with async, WebSockets, and a single
language for both frontend and backend out of the box (a killer
feature). And this trend is only going to grow stronger.

Commercial development of mid-sized projects is the only niche that
cannot be lost. These guys need Event-Driven architecture, telemetry,
services. And they ask the question: why choose a language that
doesn=E2=80=99t support modern technologies. Async is needed specifically f=
or
those technologies, not for FPM.