Mastering PHP 7

Multiprocessing

When speaking of multiprocessing, we often come across two seemingly colliding terms: process and thread. Where the process can be thought of as a currently running instance of an application, a thread is a path of execution within a process. A thread can do pretty much anything a process can do. However, given that threads reside within the process, we look at them as a solution for lightweight tasks, or at least tasks lighter than those employed by a process.

The PHP language leaves a lot to be desired in terms of multiprocessing/multithreading. The following two stand out as the most popular solutions:

• pcntl_fork(): This is a function that forks the currently running process
• pthreads: This is an object-orientated API that ...