Daemons with PHP: Should you really do that?

In today’s event driven world, asynchronous background processing is a core requirement. Nothing new you say – just setup a cron job! But while the rather traditional approach of periodically running scripts to handle queued up events is of course technically an option, the comparatively long delay coming with that quite often is not. On the other hand, long running background processes that listen to queues are not exactly known to be a strong hold of PHP – rather the opposite.

But is that still true for modern PHP? If you’d dare, how could such a daemon process look like? Anything to pay especially attention to? How can you make sure this works at scale? Good questions, this talk has answers!