Concurrency in PHP: Asynchrony, Multithreading, and Parallelism

The book "Concurrency in PHP" is the first practical guide in Russian that comprehensively covers all modern approaches to parallel and asynchronous code execution in PHP. Unlike most materials limited to theory, the author provides step-by-step examples ready for implementation in real projects.

What is this book about?

You will learn how to make PHP execute multiple tasks simultaneously without blocking the main execution thread. The book covers the evolution of concurrency in PHP: from simple processes and threads (pcntl, pthreads) to the revolutionary Fibers introduced in PHP 8.1. Special attention is paid to practical aspects:

• Multithreading (pthreads): creating and synchronizing threads, working with shared resources, mutexes, and condition variables.
• Asynchronous programming (ReactPHP, Amp): event loop, non-blocking I/O, working with sockets and HTTP requests.
• Fibers (PHP 8.1+): lightweight fibers for cooperative multitasking, interaction with generators and coroutines.
• Swoole extension: coroutines, process pools, asynchronous servers and clients.
• Parallel data processing: parallelizing heavy computations, processing large arrays and queues.

Who is this book for?

The book is intended for Junior+ and Middle PHP developers who want to go beyond traditional synchronous script execution. It will be useful for:

• Backend developers building high-load APIs and web services.
• DevOps specialists looking to optimize PHP application performance.
• Architects seeking scaling methods without increasing the number of servers.

What will you learn?

After reading, you will be able to:

• Develop asynchronous HTTP clients and servers using ReactPHP and Swoole.
• Use Fibers to create efficient coroutines without third-party libraries.
• Implement the Producer-Consumer pattern for queue processing.
• Avoid data races and deadlocks in multithreaded applications.
• Integrate concurrency with popular frameworks (Laravel, Symfony).

The book is written in a lively style with an emphasis on practice. Each chapter contains exercises and code examples that can be run immediately. This is a desktop guide for those who want PHP to run faster, more efficiently, and more modernly.