A Laravel Developer's Journey Into Async PHP: Fibers, epoll, and PHP 8.6

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A Laravel developer with years of synchronous PHP experience shares lessons learned while exploring asynchronous PHP concepts triggered by an article on PHP 8.6's new Polling API. The author explains how blocking I/O causes PHP worker processes to remain idle for hundreds of milliseconds during API calls, wasting server resources even when CPU is free. Through hands-on exploration, they examined how non-blocking sockets and kernel-level I/O notification mechanisms like select(), epoll, and kqueue work, and why PHP's built-in stream_select() requires no external extensions. The post also clarifies common misconceptions, such as conflating busy-polling CPU waste with the separate scaling limitations of select(), known as the C10K problem. The writeup is aimed at PHP developers who have never worked with async patterns and walks through the concepts step by step.

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