PHP Concurrency: Handling Multiple Requests Simultaneously Despite Being Synchronous
PHP is primarily a synchronous language, which means that it executes code sequentially. However, when it comes to handling multiple requests simultaneously, it’s not PHP itself but the web server that manages this concurrency. Here’s how it works:
- Web Server: When users send requests to a PHP-based web app, the web server (like Apache or Nginx) handles each one independently. Depending on the server setup, it may create a new process or thread for each request.
- Multi-Process Approach: For each incoming request, the server forks a new PHP process. This means that each request gets its dedicated PHP process, allowing for true concurrency.
- FastCGI (PHP-FPM): With the FastCGI process manager (PHP-FPM), PHP runs as a separate service with its own process pool. This allows a web server like Nginx to handle requests asynchronously and pass them to PHP-FPM, which then processes them using its pool of worker processes.
- Session Locking: PHP's default file-based session handling can lead to locking issues under heavy concurrent access. This problem can be mitigated by using database sessions, which store session data in a database, ensuring smoother concurrent access and scalability.
In summary, while PHP code is executed synchronously, the web server’s architecture allows multiple PHP instances to run in parallel, handling multiple requests at the same time.
PHP Foundation #synchronous #asynchronous