In a post to the Madewithlove blog Maxime Fabre takes a look at threading in PHP using the pthreads support that can be included into your PHP installation.

As far as I can remember, PHP has always had a terrible reputation at handling very heavy (or asynchronous) tasks. [...] But PHP can do threading, and more importantly it's a lot easier than you probably think.

[...] In this article I'm going to dive into the pthreads extension (short for POSIX Threads). It has been around for a while (since 2012) but I feel like too many people forget it exists or assume it is going to be painful to use – mostly because the official documentation is rather slim about it.

They start by getting the pthreads support installed locally (it assumes you use OS X and the "brew" package manager but it can be installed manually too). The article starts off by defining some basic nomenclature from the pthreads world and gives a diagram of how it all fits together. From there it gets into some examples, showing a simple thread class to fetch Google results and how to fire off multiple instances at the same time. They then extend this even further and look at the concept of "workers" and using them to manage individual jobs. It then moves up the next level and looks at "pools" of workers and processing multiple workers at the same time.

There's also a section dealing with one "gotcha" that can happen with class inheritance between parent and child threads. They show how to work around this with a custom Worker class that performs the autoloading for you and is executed at the start of a Pool. Finally they cover the messaging between the child threads and, as a bonus, how threading could be used in a command bus setup.

In this latest post Gonzalo Ayuso his recent experiences with <1 href="http://nodephp.org/">React (Node.js in PHP) and an example of how he worked up a script to pool database connections.

Last saturday I meet a new hype: “React” also known as “node.php”. Basically it’s the same idea than node.js but built with PHP instead of javascript. [...] Basically I want to create a database connection pooling. It’s one of the things that I miss in PHP. I wrote a post here some time ago with this idea with one exotic experiment building one connection pooling using gearman. Today the idea is the same but now with React.

He includes the sample script, also including the line to add to your composer.json file to install React and the SQL to create the sample tables. The script makes a PDO connection and assigns it to the pool, an instance of his "CPool" class. If you want to try it out, you can find the code over on github.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post to his blog today looking at using the Gearman tool to pool database connections for his application and make them available for easy reuse.

Handling Database connections with PHP is pretty straightforward. Just open database connection, perform the actions we need, and close it. There’s a little problem. We cannot create a pool of database connections. We need to create the connection in every request. Create and destroy, again and again. [...] In this post I’m going to try to explain a personal experiment to create a connection pooling using gearman.

He includes a basic database connection example with PDO, logging into a single database and fetching all of the results. To integrate this into the gearman functionality, he creates a configuration class to hold connection details and the worker code (along with some libraries to help manage the connections) that gets the results, serializes them and returns them back to the calling script.