PHP Academy · Lesson

High-Performance Servers with Swoole

Serve thousands of connections with coroutine-based Swoole.

What Swoole Is

Swoole (and its fork OpenSwoole) is a C extension that turns PHP into a high-performance, coroutine-based, event-driven runtime. Instead of PHP-FPM spawning a process per request, a Swoole server boots your app once and keeps it resident in memory, serving requests from a pool of long-lived workers with built-in coroutines. The result: order-of-magnitude throughput gains and native concurrency inside a single request.

The Persistent HTTP Server

The classic example: a full HTTP server in a script. It listens, dispatches each request to a worker, and never re-bootstraps the framework. Note this requires ext-swoole — it does not run on stock PHP CLI.

<?php
$server = new Swoole\Http\Server('0.0.0.0', 9501);
$server->set(['worker_num' => 4]);

$server->on('request', function ($request, $response) {
    $response->header('Content-Type', 'application/json');
    $response->end(json_encode(['hello' => $request->server['request_uri']]));
});

echo "listening on :9501\n";
$server->start();

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