You would query those first surely, before loading the DB? Regardless, I've been using Redis and Memcache for years from PHP, so mute point.
> I use multiple threads in a single request flow frequently.
So how do you track those? And for how long do they live after the parent request has been processed, or do they block the parent? Gets complicated quickly.
> It's ugly and inconsistent, takes time to memorize, and leads to errors.
Rasmus will admit the same, but he will also admit he does not care (I've seen him say this during a talk). Nobody bought your product because it had beautiful, consistent code.
> This limits you to writing basic CRUD. And so many other languages offer this.
99.9% of web apps are CRUD.
You probably want to report a degraded status so any traffic that can be bled off into another cluster can do so.
> So how do you track those?
There's a thread pool.
> And for how long do they live after the parent request has been processed.
They might live on after the request flow if they're still doing work.
> or do they block the parent?
Depends on the job and the nature of the API.
> Gets complicated quickly.
That's engineering.
> Rasmus will admit the same, but he will also admit he does not care (I've seen him say this during a talk). Nobody bought your product because it had beautiful, consistent code.
That's why I buy a lot of things. It's also one of many reasons why I don't buy PHP.
> 99.9% of web apps are CRUD.
Now that platforms have taken over, I don't think this is the case. Large systems have sophisticated needs that don't always map to a traditional relational data store. PubSub, feeds, queues, concurrency, eventual consistency, vector clocks, etc.
Platforms are going to eat the long tail in the search for growth.
When you can't query your DB, you hit your resident memory cache. Redis, Memcached, etc. You probably have background threads that do cache invalidation, queue management, etc.
You frequently have to be more reliable than your database.
> he responded that it was not required in a web context, as web servers already have threads per request so its a mute point.
I use multiple threads in a single request flow frequently. Dispatching requests to other services or data stores, updating in-memory caches or queues (not Redis, but living within the app itself), etc. It's an important tool.
> Ok now you have just thrown away one of the main benefits of PHP. Remember, Rasmus is a C programmer, not a PHP programmer, so he wanted to leverage that HUGE library of existing C-code from his new scripting language, from the very beginning, deliberately by design.
Good for him. I don't see why that matters for anyone else. It's ugly and inconsistent, takes time to memorize, and leads to errors.
> Yes because each request is a synchronous thread, as described above above. By design.
This limits you to writing basic CRUD. And so many other languages offer this.