Introducing Hypervel: A Coroutine Framework for Laravel Artisans

Hypervel is a high-performance PHP framework inspired by Laravel, offering native coroutine support for developers building high-concurrency and I/O-intensive applications. Created by Albert Chen, it is an unofficial framework that adopts Laravel’s elegant development experience while leveraging Swoole's asynchronous capabilities.

Since there's Octane package maintained by the official team, why do we need a new framework? It may not seem wise to reinvent the wheel, does it?

#Why not Octane?

While Octane impressively speeds up Laravel's performance by running the application in the long-lived lifecycle, which eliminates the cost for bootstrapping the framework each request, it can't solve performance issues brought by blocking I/O.

For example, imagine building an AI-powered chatbot with Laravel. Let's say each conversation API takes only 3~5 seconds to respond. If you run your Octane application with 10 workers, how many requests can your application handle at the same time if there are 100 concurrent requests? The QPS (Queries per Second) for your application will be less than 3. Why is this happening?

This occurs because Octane doesn't provide non-blocking I/O capabilities to Laravel. All the workers remain blocked until the end of these I/O requests. Furthermore, due to backward compatibility constraints of the current framework, Laravel has less possibility to support coroutine features in the near future.

You can refer to this issue for more details.

#Features of Hypervel

Hypervel is built on Swoole extension, and all components support coroutines out of the box. Hypervel ports many core packages from Laravel while maintaining familiar usage patterns, making it instantly accessible to Laravel developers.

This framework combines the elegant and expressive development experience of Laravel with the powerful performance benefits of coroutine-based programming. If you're a Laravel developer, you'll feel right at home with this framework, requiring minimal learning curve.

You can find more practical code examples in Coding Like in Laravel.

Here are some key features:

• Development experience extremely similar to Laravel.
• Extremely high performance, with QPS 10 times higher than Octane in non-I/O scenarios, and hundreds of times higher in I/O-intensive scenarios.
• Coroutine support out out the box, with even PHP's built-in I/O functions automatically being hooked to support coroutinies.
• Support for object pools and connection pools, such as database, redis and http clients
• Seamless two-way communication with your existing Laravel projects through Cache, Lock, and Queue.
• Coroutine support not limited to handling HTTP requests. Queue and Scheduling can also leverage coroutines, allowing a single process to achieve the concurrency that would require hundreds of workers in Laravel.

This is an ideal choice for building microservices, API gateways, and high-concurrency applications where traditional PHP frameworks often encounter performance constraints.

#Coroutines

Coroutines are functions that can pause their execution and later resume from where they left off, maintaining their state between pauses. Think of them as functions with multiple entry and exit points.

When a coroutine encounters an operation that would normally block (like waiting for network data), instead of blocking the entire program, it yields control back to a scheduler. The scheduler can then run other coroutines until the blocking operation completes.

In Hypervel, I/O components such as database connections, file operations, HTTP clients, and even all native PHP I/O functions work as coroutines. The overhead for each coroutine is extremely lightweight compared to processes or threads, making them ideal for concurrent I/O operations. This architecture enables Hypervel to perform excellently in I/O-intensive scenarios.

You can learn more about how coroutine works in Hypervel in Coroutine section of the official documentation.

What's more, coroutines are not only supported in request handling. In Laravel, the only way to improve concurrency in queues or task scheduling is to increase the number of workers on the machine. But in Hypervel, you can run multiple jobs simultaneously under coroutine scheduling. This means one worker process can act as hundreds of traditional workers for I/O bound jobs in Laravel.

#Benchmark

The benchmark tests cover two distinct scenarios to evaluate performance under different conditions:

1. Simple API Test: A basic hello world API endpoint. No middleware applied.

2. Simulated I/O Wait Test: Sleep for one second to simulate I/O wait time

Laravel Octane's QPS number is close to 8, but because it differs so significantly from Hypervel's numbers, it appears this way when generated in the chart.

You can see benchmark for more detailed information.

#Prerequisites

Hypervel has a few system requirements. You should ensure that your web server has the following minimum PHP version and extensions:

• PHP >= 8.2
• Swoole PHP extension >= 5.1
• Pcntl PHP extension

You can install Swoole extension via PECL:

pecl install swoole

Mac users can also install Swoole via brew:

brew tap shivammathur/extensions
brew install shivammathur/extensions/swoole@8.3

Using shivammathur/extensions can help you solve common issues while installing swoole on Apple M1 environments.

For full requirements, you can refer to server requirements on the website.

#Installation

You can create a new Hypervel project easily via Composer's create-project command:

composer create-project hypervel/hypervel example-app

Once the project has been created, start Hypervel's local development server using serve command:

php artisan serve

Once you have started the HTTP server, your application will be accessible in your web browser at http://localhost:9501 by default.

#Conclusion

Undoubtedly, Laravel is the top choice for building web applications in many use cases, especially with its mature community and rich ecosystem.

However, in some high-concurrency or intensive I/O scenarios, you can definitely give Hypervel a try for ultra performance and enjoy Laravel-like development experience at the same time.

You can get started with Hypervel by checking out the official website.