Why Workerman Redefines PHP Backend Performance for Real‑Time Apps

Overview

Workerman is an open‑source, high‑performance PHP application container that extends PHP beyond traditional web page generation. It is a low‑level, generic service framework rather than an MVC framework, allowing developers to build TCP/UDP proxies, ladder proxies, game servers, mail servers, FTP servers, and even PHP implementations of services such as Redis, databases, Nginx, and php‑fpm.

Internally Workerman uses a multi‑process model combined with epoll (on Linux) and non‑blocking I/O. Each worker process can maintain tens of thousands of concurrent connections while running in memory without Apache, Nginx, or php‑fpm. Supported transport layers include TCP, UDP, UNIX sockets, long‑living connections, WebSocket, HTTP, HTTPS, WSS and custom protocols. The framework also provides timers, asynchronous socket clients, async Redis, async HTTP, async message queues and other high‑performance components.

Key Features

Multi‑process architecture with optional worker count configuration.

Event‑driven, epoll‑based I/O for Linux; fallback to select/poll on other platforms.

Built‑in support for TCP, UDP, UNIX socket, WebSocket, HTTP/HTTPS and custom protocols.

Asynchronous clients for Redis, HTTP, and generic sockets.

Timer and task scheduling utilities.

Ability to run as a daemon, reload workers gracefully, and handle signals.

Typical Usage

To start a simple TCP server:

<?php
require __DIR__.'/vendor/autoload.php';
use Workerman\Worker;

$worker = new Worker('tcp://0.0.0.0:1234'); // listen on port 1234
$worker->onMessage = function($connection, $data) {
    $connection->send('You said: '.$data);
};

Worker::runAll();

For a WebSocket server, replace the protocol with websocket:// and handle onConnect, onMessage, and onClose callbacks accordingly.

Update Log (selected recent changes)

Improved test suite for Windows and macOS (#951).

Graceful shutdown and code‑style standardisation (#952).

Fixed onWorkerStop event not being triggered (#959).

Added first‑class callable syntax for event handlers (#972).

Refactored Event.php and enhanced type definitions (#965, #975).

Introduced $outputStream property for configurable output streams (#984).

Fixed STDOUT/STDERR closure in resetStd (#986).

Allowed logFile to be set to /dev/null for silent workers (#993).

Added application/wasm MIME type support (#1032).

Implemented response construction using property promotion (#1050) and added attribute promotion support (#1049).

Compatibility fixes for PHP 8.4, including explicit null handling (#1047).