Have you heard of phasync for PHP? It adds extensive async and non blocking IO without having to do much in user code land by using some newer low level PHP functions. AFAIK it's a prototype for native async in PHP, too. It's not surprising to see it beat NodeJS and is competitive with Go. The language itself happens to be very fast and computationally efficient at this task. You can thank C and Rasmus Lerdorf for that. After removing blocking IO, we see it's true speed potential. Zerolith still performs this task 4 times faster per CPU core, but doesn't help make async easy. I think the second PHP implements it, we are absolutely all in on fixing PHP's achilles heel in our framework design too. The performance potential is just too juicy to ignore.