Multitasking in PHP with Fibers

This is an excercise to illustrate how PHP fibers can increase application performance with multitasking. This code is an addition to my talk at Kilo Dev.X event in October 2023.

Application description

Application is a PHP script that converts *.tiff images to *.jpeg format. Conversion is done using ImageMagick's convert utility.

Installation pre-requisites

Make sure you have ImageMagick installed. On Mac you can use homebrew:

brew install imagemagick

On linux, use your package manager, e.g. apt in Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install imagemagick

To verify ImageMagick installation run the following command:

convert logo: logo.gif

Usage

Repository contains multiple branches, each containing the application at different stage:

• main branch contains a naive, synchronous implementation of converter
• 1--sync-nonblocking-refactor branch: the application is still synchronous but contains some changes and optimizations for running asynchronously
• 2--async-fibers branch: application is refactored to run asynchronously using fibers
• 3--optimize-performance branch: limited the number of fibers to optimize application performance in long-run

Comparing Sync vs Async performance

Sync

~/Projects/fibers> php src/convert.php
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3727.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3727.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3706.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3706.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3700.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3700.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3703.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3703.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3714.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3714.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3699.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3699.jpg
Directory processed in 3.7 seconds

Async

~/Projects/fibers> php src/convert.php
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3727.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3727.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3703.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3703.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3714.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3714.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3700.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3700.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3696.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3696.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3706.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3706.jpg
Successfully converted ./photos/DSCF3699.tiff => ./photos/export/DSCF3699.jpg
Directory processed in 1.5 seconds