Hyperf

Hyperf runs on coroutine-based engines like Swoole or Swow, which keep the PHP application resident in memory and handle concurrent requests without reloading the framework on each request. Traditional PHP frameworks like Laravel follow a request-response model where the application is bootstrapped fresh for every incoming request. This gives Hyperf significantly higher throughput for high-concurrency workloads.

Yes, Hyperf provides built-in components for microservice patterns including service registration and discovery, RPC communication, circuit breakers, rate limiting, and distributed tracing. These features make it well suited for building microservice-based systems entirely in PHP, which is unusual among PHP frameworks.

Hyperf requires a coroutine-capable PHP runtime, most commonly Swoole or Swow, which are PHP extensions that provide asynchronous I/O and coroutine support. It also requires PHP 7.2 or higher, with newer versions recommended. The framework cannot run on standard PHP-FPM without these extensions.

Hyperf is an open-source project with active development on GitHub, and it has a strong following in the Chinese PHP community. The framework provides its own dependency injection container, database ORM, and middleware system. Documentation is available in both Chinese and English.