I do a lot of core customization as well as sapi development in PHP (the interpreter, not scripting.) I can respect that you are a knowledgeable coder from the projects that you have done, but you seem to know little about PHP internals. You should look more deeply into the subject more before writing more posts about the ‘lies’ and ‘pretending’ associated with PHP threading.

There is usually five parts to a PHP solution. A server, a server to PHP interface, the PHP library, PHP extension interfaces, and extension libraries. Each of these parts are often developed by different groups/individuals and they often don’t play well with each other. If even one of them is not threadsafe it will break the whole system. The PHP lib is threadsafe, and most servers are as well, but many SAPIs are not, and many extensions are not.

From what I have seen and *experienced*, the only threadsafe SAPI that ships with PHP is the Fastcgi SAPI. All others will break if they are threaded.

If the SAPI and PHP threads successfully, extension interfaces and/or extension libraries can still break the parent process if they are not thread safe.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/dont-believe-the-lies-php-isnt-thread-safe-yet/