I wasn't trying to debunk a claim that something is impossible.
No, you didn't.
What you probably meant is "run it from cron, or create an OS service that starts from init.d/systemd/whatever". Which answers the question, but isn't very impressive from a technology stack.
If they wanted something more specific, they should ask for what they really want.
I also meant long-running processes, which it sounds like is still problematic. To be fair, it doesn't sound like PHP was ever designed to be used for long-running processes, to which I guess "Fair enough", but that might make things like a job worker queue more complicated if you want to write the workers in PHP (it sounds like you'll need a dispatcher in a different language because that would be a long-running process).
Have you reported them upstream? That implies a memory safety or garbage collection bug.
PHP has a package manager IF you want to use the vast offering of open source PHP libraries and frameworks.
https://getcomposer.org/download
To use it, create a composer.json and run:
On my systems, I like to alias it so that I just have to type: Alternatively, if you use a Jetbrains IDE (i.e. PHPStorm), you can usually install dependencies with one click.> And to be fair, as a naive non-PHP user, I have 0 clue how you would go about setting up long running scripts that don't necessarily correlate to a web request.
php /path/to/script.php
It can run as long as you'd like.
If you want to do it on demand (i.e. writing a webserver in PHP), that's difficult. But generally: Why would you want to do that? It becomes an X-Y Problem.