Parallel, Multi-Curl PHP SoapClient

A drop-in replacement for PHP's native SoapClient that can fire many SOAP requests in parallel using curl's multi handle, while keeping the familiar synchronous SoapClient API when you need it.

Working with SOAP is often painful:

• SOAP messages are verbose and obscure.
• Performance suffers because the native client has no connection pooling, TLS session reuse, or low-level TCP tuning.
• A list of calls can only be sent sequentially — you loop and wait for each response.
• Debugging the underlying HTTP (headers / payloads / errors) is hard.

ParallelSoapClient lets you send requests concurrently and gives you hooks for a PSR-3 logger, response parsing, custom SOAPAction headers, XML formatting and arbitrary curl options (such as TLS session sharing and connection reuse).

Features

• Single and parallel modes — switch with setMulti(true|false).
• True concurrency via curl_multi_exec — consecutive calls no longer block each other.
• TLS / DNS / cookie session sharing through a shared curl handle per endpoint.
• Per-request curl metadata captured in $client->curlInfo.
• Deterministic request ids — identical payloads hash to the same id, so duplicate calls are sent only once.
• First-class exception handling in both single and parallel modes.
• Pluggable hooks — logger, result parser, SOAPAction builder, XML formatter, debug callback.

Requirements

• PHP 8.0+
• ext-soap, ext-curl, ext-libxml

The library is tested in CI against PHP 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 (including a TLS suite).

Upgrading from 3.x? 4.0 moves the client out of the now-reserved Soap\ namespace into Meabed\ParallelSoap\. Change use Soap\ParallelSoapClient; to use Meabed\ParallelSoap\ParallelSoapClient; — the API is otherwise unchanged. 3.x also fatal-errors on PHP 8.4/8.5, so upgrading is required there. See UPGRADING.md and the CHANGELOG.

Installation

Usage

Synchronous (single) call

Behaves exactly like the native SoapClient, but the transport is curl:

Parallel (multi) call

Queue any number of calls, then execute them all at once with run():

Handling errors in parallel mode

In parallel mode exceptions are not thrown; instead each result is either the parsed response or a SoapFault object, so you inspect the result type:

Calling a method that does not exist in the WSDL short-circuits before any HTTP request and returns a string prefixed with ParallelSoapClient::ERROR_STR (*ERROR*).

Running a subset of queued requests

Configuration

All hooks are passed through the constructor $options array (and are removed before being handed to the native SoapClient):

Plus the runtime setters:

• setMulti(bool) — toggle parallel mode.
• setCurlOptions(array) — any CURLOPT_* options (TLS, timeouts, proxies, verbosity…).
• setLogSoapRequest(bool) — log every request payload through the PSR-3 logger.

See the example/ directory for complete, runnable scripts.

How it works

__doRequest() is overridden to build a curl handle per call instead of sending the request immediately. In parallel mode the handles are accumulated and executed together through curl_multi_*; the raw responses are then fed back through the native SOAP parser so you get ordinary PHP objects (or SoapFaults) out the other end. A shared curl handle per endpoint enables TLS session, DNS and cookie reuse across the batch.

For a deeper walkthrough — the request lifecycle, the local SOAP server used by the tests, and diagrams — see docs/development.md.

Testing

The test suite has two layers:

• Hermetic tests (tests/Hermetic) run against a local SOAP server started on a free port — over both HTTP and TLS (with a generated self-signed certificate). They need no network access and run by default.
• External integration tests (tests/Crcind, tests/Dne) hit public demo SOAP services. They are tagged with the external group, excluded from the default run, and skip automatically when the host is unreachable.

You can also run the local SOAP server on its own with composer dev-server and call it directly — see docs/development.md for a worked example.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — please review the guidelines:

• One feature or change per pull request
• Write meaningful commit messages
• Follow the existing coding standards

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for a list of notable changes.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who has reported issues and contributed fixes, including @c266 for independently diagnosing the PHP 8.5 __doRequest() signature break (#180, #179).

License

Released under the MIT license.