What Is Workerman? Exploring PHP’s High‑Performance Application Container

What is Workerman?

Workerman is an open‑source, pure‑PHP application container designed for high‑performance network services. It is not an MVC framework; instead it provides a low‑level, generic service framework that enables developers to build TCP/UDP proxies, ladder (VPN) proxies, game servers, mail servers, FTP servers, and even PHP‑based implementations of services such as Redis, databases, Nginx, and php‑fpm.

Architecture

The core of Workerman follows a model similar to Nginx: it combines a multi‑process architecture with epoll (on Linux) and non‑blocking I/O. Each worker process can maintain tens of thousands of concurrent connections while residing permanently in memory, eliminating the need for external containers such as Apache, Nginx, or php‑fpm. This design yields extremely low latency and high throughput.

Supported Communication Types

Transport protocols: TCP, UDP, UNIX socket.

Connection style: long‑living (persistent) connections.

Application protocols: WebSocket, HTTP, WSS, HTTPS, and any custom protocol.

High‑Performance Components

Timers for scheduled tasks.

Asynchronous socket client.

Asynchronous Redis client.

Asynchronous HTTP client.

Asynchronous message queue.

Typical Usage Pattern

A Workerman service is defined by creating a Worker instance, configuring its properties, and assigning callback functions for events such as onMessage. The framework then starts all worker processes with Worker::runAll().

require_once __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';
use Workerman\Worker;

// Create a TCP worker listening on port 1234
$worker = new Worker('tcp://0.0.0.0:1234');

// Number of processes (default is the number of CPU cores)
$worker->count = 4;

// Define the message handling logic
$worker->onMessage = function($connection, $data) {
    // Echo received data back to the client
    $connection->send("Received: $data
");
};

// Start the event loop for all workers
Worker::runAll();

This minimal example demonstrates how Workerman creates a persistent, multi‑process TCP server with non‑blocking I/O. Developers can replace the callback with any protocol handling logic, integrate the asynchronous components listed above, and scale the count parameter to match the target hardware.