Hello and Merry Christmas! One of the main features of FrankenPHP is its worker mode, which lets you keep a PHP application in memory to handle multiple HTTP requests.
Worker modes are becoming increasingly popular in the PHP world. Symfony (Runtime Component), Laravel (Octane), and many projects based on these frameworks (API Platform, Sulu...) now support a worker mode. In addition to FrankenPHP, projects such as RoadRunner and Swoole provide engines supporting worker modes. According to benchmarks, worker modes can improve the performance of PHP applications by up to 15 times. In addition to FrankenPHP, which is basically a SAPI for Go's integrated web server, a new generation of SAPIs is currently under development. Several SAPIs written in Rust (including one by the RoadRunner team) are currently under development. These SAPIs, along with existing SAPIs, could benefit from a shared infrastructure to build worker modes. The FrankenPHP code is written and should be easy to move around in PHP itself, to enable other SAPIs to use it. In addition to sharing code, maintenance, performance optimization, etc., the existence of a common infrastructure would standardize the way worker scripts are created and provide a high-level PHP API for writing worker scripts that work with all SAPIs that rely on this new feature. SAPIs will still have to handle fetching requests from the web server and pausing the worker to wait for new requests (in FrankenPHP, we use GoRoutines for this, in Rust or C, other primitives will have to be used), but almost everything else could be shared. For reference, here's the FrankenPHP code I propose to integrate into libphp: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/blob/main/frankenphp.c#L245 The public API is documented here: https://frankenphp.dev/docs/worker/#custom-apps I'd like to hear what the community thinks about this. Would you be interested in this functionality in PHP? Should I work on an RFC? If there's interest, I can work on a patch. Cheers, -- Kévin Dunglas
