Swoole hijacks network I/O from Zend Engine. Thus, it's capable of performing async I/O while keeping the userland code the same. What the benchmark shows is wh

Swoole hijacks network I/O from Zend Engine. Thus, it's capable of performing async I/O while keeping the userland code the same. What the benchmark shows is what happens when there's non-blocking I/O when speaking to the DB. PHP's problem is its synchronous nature, but Swoole easily bypasses that limitation. Btw. Swoole is not written in PHP. It's C++. It's compiled as an extension for PHP.