Achieving High-Performance HTTP in PHP Without Threads: Simulating Parallel Requests

Modern PHP applications often rely on multiple external services via HTTP, especially with the rise of AI tools like OpenAI. However, PHP’s single-threaded nature forces your application to wait for each response, creating inefficiencies and consuming valuable resources. Even if each request takes just milliseconds, handling thousands of requests in parallel can quickly exhaust memory and database connections.

But what if you could simulate parallelism in PHP without multiple threads or processes? In this session, I’ll demonstrate how to achieve asynchronous-like behavior using proven tools like cURL and Guzzle, even in a single-threaded environment.

I’ll introduce a practical technique where HTTP requests are prepared and serialized, along with your program’s state, before being dispatched to PHP workers. These workers handle the requests in parallel, and then return the responses to your main program, which resumes execution seamlessly.

However, this method comes with challenges, such as ensuring the program state is serializable and deserializable, and I’ll walk you through best practices to overcome these hurdles.

Join me to learn how you can unlock new levels of performance in your PHP applications, achieving parallelism without the complexity or overhead of multi-threading.

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Session info:

Speaker: Max Fomichev

Infrastructure Engineer at Manychat

Date: 21 March 2025

Time: 11:50 - 12:20

Relevant tags:
Performance PHP

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