Real-Time Concurrency in PHP: Evaluating FrankenPHP vs Laravel Octane with RoadRunner & Swoole

The Shift from Share-Nothing to Persistent Runtimes

Traditional PHP boots the framework, configures container service providers, and loads configuration on every HTTP request. Persistent runtimes like Laravel Octane with FrankenPHP or RoadRunner boot the application once into RAM, keeping worker threads active to serve requests in sub-millisecond execution cycles.

FrankenPHP Advantages

• Built directly on the modern Caddy web server with automatic Let's Encrypt SSL.
• Native 103 Early Hints and HTTP/3 support out of the box.
• Full support for worker mode without the memory leak hazards of raw C extensions.