Async PHP in production lessons benchmarks and tradeoffs

Async PHP has come a long way from being an experimental concept to powering real, production-grade systems. But anyone who’s actually deployed async PHP in production knows — it’s not all sunshine and benchmarks. There are sharp edges, unexpected tradeoffs, and a learning curve that goes beyond “just install Swoole or ReactPHP.” In this advanced session, we’ll take a hard look at what running async PHP in production really means. We’ll walk through live demos comparing synchronous vs. asynchronous execution models under real-world workloads — from database I/O and API calls to parallel job handling. You’ll see real performance benchmarks, resource usage metrics, and what happens when async code meets legacy frameworks or blocking libraries. We’ll cover: 1. When async PHP makes sense — and when it doesn’t 2. Performance tuning with Swoole, ReactPHP, and Fibers 3. Debugging concurrency issues, race conditions, and memory leaks 4. Integrating async patterns into existing monoliths safely 5. Lessons learned from production — what went right, what went wrong, and what we’d never do again Expect raw numbers, war stories, and code you can take home. If you’re ready to push PHP to its performance limits and understand the real-world tradeoffs of asynchronous execution, this session will give you the data, the insights, and the confidence to do it right.