Unlock High-Performance PHP with Wind Framework’s Pure Coroutine Architecture

Introduction

Wind Framework is a pure PHP (no third‑party extensions) high‑performance coroutine framework. Recent PHP improvements (PHP 7 optimizations, PHP 8 JIT) have boosted raw speed, but the ecosystem still suffers from I/O‑bound bottlenecks. Asynchronous and coroutine programming can fundamentally change PHP’s performance and capability.

Traditional php‑fpm limits concurrency to the number of processes, forcing developers to rely on external tools (crontab, Supervisord, message queues, middleware) for tasks such as scheduled jobs, long‑running processes, or connection‑pool management. Scaling beyond a few hundred concurrent requests often requires switching to languages with built‑in multithreading or coroutine support.

By using a pure‑PHP coroutine framework, these limitations can be addressed with far fewer resources.

Pure PHP Coroutine

The framework’s coroutine model is built on PHP’s Fiber feature, which allows pausing, yielding, and resuming execution at any stack level. This enables asynchronous code to be written in a synchronous style.

For developers familiar with JavaScript, the concepts correspond to async/await and Promise. In early versions (v0) of Wind, developers had to manually call call() to create a coroutine environment and use yield to wait for results. Starting with v1, Amphp’s Fiber‑based implementation provides implicit coroutines, removing the need for explicit async markers.

async function getResult() {
    const res = await fetch('/example');
    const data = await res.json();
    return data.something;
}

The equivalent PHP code in v0 looks like:

function getResult() {
    $result = $this->request('/example');
    $buffer = $result->getBody()->buffer();
    $data = json_decode($buffer, true);
    return $data['something'];
}

Even with traditional Future objects, the await() method can pause the entire call stack, making pure‑PHP coroutine usage straightforward.

Features

HTTP server with controller‑based routing and static file support

Dependency injection container

PSR‑16 SimpleCache‑compatible coroutine cache

Process information collection component

Timer component for scheduled tasks

Coroutine MySQL client with connection pool and query builder

Asynchronous logging based on Monolog

Custom process component

Asynchronous message queue supporting Redis and Beanstalk drivers

Coroutine Redis client

TaskWorker to offload synchronous calls to other processes asynchronously

View component supporting Twig and other templating engines

Running Example

git clone https://github.com/wind-framework/example.git wind-example
cd wind-example
composer install
php start.php start

These commands clone the example repository, install dependencies, and start the framework.