Albert Chen gave a presentation about using Swoole, an extension for PHP, to build high concurrency applications. Swoole provides asynchronous network capabilities that allow PHP applications to have an event-driven, non-blocking architecture. It addresses issues with PHP's blocking I/O and stateless model that limit scalability. Swoole improves performance by keeping the PHP code in memory and handling requests with coroutines instead of processes. While Swoole helps PHP applications achieve higher concurrency, traditional PHP code requires refactoring to fully utilize Swoole's features. Overall, Swoole extends PHP's capabilities for building high performance web applications.

1. @JomLaunch 2021
Build your High Concurrency App
with PHP and Swoole
Albert Chen

2. About Me
{
"data": {
"human": {
"name": "Albert Chen",
"occupation": "Software Architect",
"website": "https://albert-chen.com",
"interests": [
"traveling",
"programming",
"cooking"
]
},
"tags": [
"Laravel Artisan",
"Swoole Enthusiast",
"Open Source Contributor"
]
}
}

3. Outline
• Introduction of Swoole
• PHP’s Internal Lifecycle
• Blocking I/O in PHP
• Server Structure of Swoole
• Benchmark of Swoole
• Coroutine in Swoole
• Some Facts about Swoole
• Q&A

4. Slido
Join at
slido.com
#760920

5. Slido
Join at
slido.com
#760920

6. What is Swoole?

8. What is Swoole?
• Since 2012
• Open source based on Apache-2.0 License
• 17k stars until July 2021
• More than 100 contributors
• Adopted by many enterprises in China
• O
ffi
cially supported by Laravel Octane

9. What is Swoole?
• A C extension for PHP
• An asynchronous network engine for PHP
• Features:
• Event-driven non-blocking I/O
• HTTP / HTTP2 / Websocket / TCP / UDP
• Coroutine (CSP Model)
• Excellent performance for high concurrency

10. What is Swoole?
• Not a new language, but an extension for PHP
• Provides many new features for traditional PHP
• New lifecycle in Swoole
• Server patterns, coroutine, async I/O, Process Management, etc.
• It's still under active development
• Stable for production environment
• High performance

11. Usage Statistics for Websites

12. PHP’s Benchmark
https://kinsta.com/blog/php-benchmarks/

13. Benchmark Comparison
https://www.toptal.com/back-end/server-side-io-performance-node-php-java-go

14. Why PHP Performs
Poorly in High Concurrency?

15. PHP Lifecycle

16. How many files are required for one
request in Laravel?
426
get_included_files()
In Laravel 8.52

17. Stateless PHP
• How do we serve PHP today?
• PHP-FPM
• mod_php for Apache
• Both patterns are all stateless

18. Stateless PHP
• Pros
• Easy scaling
• Simple, less risk causing memory leaks
• Cons
• States can't be shared between requests
• States must rely on external storages
• Resources can't be reused e
ffi
ciently
• Connection cost is expensive (like database)
• Not good for high performance

19. Blocking I/O in PHP
• PHP is originally created as glue layer to call C functions
• The I/O model is blocking by default
• Almost all client-side libraries involving I/O are blocking
• Multiple process for handling blocking I/O
• I/O bound concurrency depends on process number
• Cost for context switch in processes is expensive

20. Blocking I/O in PHP
• Resource can't be reused
• I/O requests are blocking
• 80% time cost on blocking I/O

21. Blocking I/O in PHP

22. Event Loop in NodeJS

23. Concurrency Problem
• 100 requests at the same time need 100 processes
• 100 connections will be established as well
• Scale to increase concurrency

24. Let’s See What Changes
in Swoole

25. Server Structure in Swoole

26. PHP Lifecycle in Swoole
Run only once!

27. Server Structure in Swoole
• Code Is Persistent in Memory
• Swoole Server Takes Lifecycle Over PHP
• Reduce Initialization Steps
• Reduce Response Latency
• Event-driven Non-blocking I/O for Requests

28. Benchmark Comparison
between Go and Swoole

29. Server Benchmark in Go

30. Server Benchmark in Go

31. Server Benchmark in PHP

32. Server Benchmark in PHP

33. This Doesn’t Mean
PHP with Swoole is Faster Than Go
(Of Course Not)

34. Coroutine in Swoole

35. Coroutine in Swoole
• Non-Blocking I/Os are scheduled by coroutine automatically.
PHP is the best
Swoole is awesome!
Hello world!

36. Coroutine in Swoole
Hello Swoole
1.2.3.4
• Non-Blocking I/Os are scheduled by coroutine automatically.

37. Coroutine in Swoole
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
…
Hello Swoole!
• Non-Blocking I/Os are scheduled by coroutine automatically.

38. Coroutine in Swoole
Hello Swoole!
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
1.2.3.4
…
• Non-Blocking I/Os are scheduled by coroutine automatically.

39. Coroutine in Swoole
• CSP Model
1
2
3
4
5

40. Some Facts about Swoole
• Most of traditional PHP projects needs to be refactored.
• Convert requests and responses

41. Some Facts about Swoole
• Global states in PHP needs to be used more carefully. (eg. $_GET,
$_POST, static, global)

42. Some Facts about Swoole
• Global states in PHP needs to be used more carefully. (eg. $_GET,
$_POST, static, global)

43. Some Facts about Swoole
• Don’t use exit/die function in your PHP application.

44. Some Facts about Swoole
• Memory leak may happen!!!

45. Some Facts about Swoole
• You can try Hyperf framework for your new projects.
Hyperf = Hyperspeed + Flexibility
https://www.hyperf.io

46. Some Facts about Swoole
• Swoole is now o
ffi
cially supported by Laravel team.
• Laravel will become friendly in long-running server
• Some Octane features rely on Swoole
• No coroutine features are supported yet

47. Some Facts about Swoole
• There’s knowledge gap for traditional PHP developers.

48. Q&A