The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial that introduces some of the fundamentals of parallel programming in PHP. In their examples they make use of the pthreads extension to help bring simpler parallel programming to the language (otherwise you'd have to do odd things with shell commands and foreground/background controls).

PHP developers seem to rarely utilise parallelism. The appeal of the simplicity of synchronous, single-threaded programming certainly is high, but sometimes the usage of a little concurrency can bring some worthwhile performance improvements.

In this article, we will be taking a look at how threading can be achieved in PHP with the pthreads extension. This will require a ZTS (Zend Thread Safety) version of PHP 7.x installed, along with the pthreads v3 installed.

Despite the article being about the use of pthreads, it starts out talking about when not to use it, possibly saving you some time in the long run. With that out of the way it then starts in on the handling of "on-off tasks" with an example of fetching the "title" value from Google.com. This is then enhanced showing how to use the "Threaded" base class to define other classes that can be used inside of threads. The article moves on covering other topics including:

• recycling threads
• pthreads and (im)mutability
• synchronization of threads

Each item in the list comes with plenty of example code showing you how to create the classes that execute the threads and the output they should generate.