PHP
PHPUnit and CodeIgniter 3.0
Apache and PHP on OS X Yosemite
HHVM on Amazon EC2 in 2 minutes
Probably you already heard about HHVM . As on their website:
HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP . HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides.
Using simple terms – HHVM allows you run scripts written in PHP but much, much more faster. Obviously you the main purpose of HHVM is to run HACK language, but it works pretty good with PHP itself.
PHP, work queues
Biggest pain point in PHP is lack of asynchronous calls. The only reasonable way is to use some kind of “backend” processing and task list to execute. Some people use cron to run given script each n-minutes and execute tasks. But there is a little bit more “professional” approach. Beanstalk is a simple, fast work queue. Idea is pretty simple – you can just throw tasks into queue and then have background worker which is pulling data from pipe and executes task.
Couple ideas: sending emails, processing images, making heavy queries into database. But the best part of it – you don’t have to use PHP for back processing. It could be anything, because protocol us universal and worker and client doesn’t have to be in the same language. So you can schedule task in PHP, and run it in Go. I’m not going too much into details. Just run some examples.