Niklas Keller has a post to his site covering the magic behind async PHP and how it can help your application gain some performance by working around the typical PHP execution flow.

Async PHP allows a massive speedup of applications by leveraging non-blocking I/O. It allows making multiple HTTP requests in parallel or any other way of I/O multiplexing. But what’s the magic behind it? How does it actually work?

He starts with a brief explanation of the difference between blocking and non-blocking I/O, pointing out that the main difference is the use of streams. He includes a bit of code to help illustrate but moves quickly on to talking about the Amp PHP package. This library allows for easier (and faster) development of non-blocking processes using an event loop. He also shares a package that was created to help make it even simpler by providing an abstraction layer on top of the Input and Output streams.