A 2026 benchmark compared PHP 8.5, Node.js 22, Go 1.24, and Python 3.12 under database I/O load, finding that PHP 8.5 with Swoole coroutines achieved 4.9–5× higher throughput than traditional synchronous runtimes at 50–200ms latency. Swoole's coroutine-based concurrency model allowed single workers to handle multiple concurrent requests, dramatically outperforming PHP-FPM, Node.js, Go, and Python in I/O-bound scenarios.
Lightspeed is a Laravel package enabling bidirectional WebSockets communication with sub-millisecond authentication via Redis, allowing HTTP and WebSocket handling on a single server. The developer showcases the technology with an interactive asteroids game demo and notes it requires Swoole and Redis as dependencies.