In his most recent post Joe Watkins talks briefly about concurrency in PHP and some of the issues that can come along with it. This includes one of the most glaring: the stress it can put on the host system with even a small number of threads being introduced.

Before we start to cover the topic of how to achieve parallel concurrency in PHP, we should first think about when it is appropriate. You may hear veterans of programming say (and newbies parrot) things like: "Threading is not web scale." This is enough to write off parallelism as something we shouldn't do for our web applications, it seems obvious that there is simply no need to multi-thread the rendering of a template, the sending of email, or any other of the laborious tasks that a web application must carry out in order to be useful. But rarely do you see an explanation of why this is the case: Why shouldn't your blog be able to multi-thread a response ?

He gives an example of a controller request that spawns off just eight threads and imagines what might happen if that controller was requested even just one hundred times (resulting in 800 threads). He does point out at least one place where it could be useful, though: separating out the portions of the application that need to use the parallelism from the rest.

Parallelism is one of the most powerful tools in our toolbox, multicore and multiprocessor systems have changed computing forever. But with great power comes great responsibility; don't abuse it, remember the story of the controller that created 800 threads with a tiny amount of traffic, whatever you do, ensure this can never happen.