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Toolkit for Concurrent Programming in PHP with pthreads

What is it?

The concurrency toolkit introduces abstract services and objects that provides easy handling for thread-safety, concurrency programming and data sharing all written in PHP-Userland.

Why?

If you are implementing multithreaded functionality you're always fighting against the same problems called Race-Conditions, Deadlocks etc... When sharing simple data or even plain PHP objects between threads you have to make sure, that everything is synchronized (Thread-safe) in any logic of your code. This Toolkit mostly helps you to avoid those problems by providing abstract services and object written in PHP-Userland.

How to use?

This toolkit is in early-stage development. Please use with caution.

The ExecutorService

It allows you to hold plain PHP objects persistent as singleton in memory accessible everywhere in your code even in different thread contexts. You can keep those plain PHP objects easily thread-safe or call certain methods asynchronous by using simple annotations like @Synchronized or @Asynchronous in method docblocks.

How it works

If you want to use the concurrency toolkit in your project you have to add it to the composer dependencies composer.json and do a composer update afterwards.

At first you have to initialise the ExecutorService in a main PHP script main.php.

Lets say you want to build a simple storage PHP object to share data all over your multithreaded implementations. The storage object could look like this. Create Storage.php and add:

Maybe you've noticed the method docblock annotations we used here. Methods marked with @Synchronized can not be called more than once at the same time. That means the $data array will always be synchronized when using all(), set(), get(), del() or inc(). Methods using @Asynchronous are called asynchronously. So if the dump() method is called it will dump the $data array while not blocking your main logic execution.

To make use of the storage object we have to create a multithreaded task simulation that should represent multithreaded business logic. So create Task.php and add:

Now bring all together and enhance the main script main.php:

If you call main.php with a thread-safe compiled php version where pthreads ext is installed as it`s provided by appserver.io runtime for example the result should look like this:

The executor service has some internal function as described here:

$executorServiceEntity->__invoke(function($self) { $self->doSomething() }); 

Issues

In order to bundle our efforts we would like to collect all issues regarding this package in the main project repository's issue tracker. Please reference the originating repository as the first element of the issue title e.g.: [appserver-io/<ORIGINATING_REPO>] A issue I am having