From my experience working with PHP for over 13 years (since PHP 3 was new), I can say your article is mostly true, and I have definitely seen the invisible-ima

From my experience working with PHP for over 13 years (since PHP 3 was new), I can say your article is mostly true, and I have definitely seen the invisible-image-as-a-poor-mans-cron trick in production a time or two. The only nitpick is that I have really only seen stuff like this on small sites that don't have enough traffic for it to ever matter, so it's generally a temporary issue or a stop-gap measure, not common practice as was implied. That said, there's nothing stopping people from just throwing a task in Redis from their PHP frontend and using node.js or Python, or Ruby to manage the queue. This is what Flickr did (http://code.flickr.net/2012/12/12/highly-available-real-time-notifications/ http://code.flickr.net/2012/12/12/highly-available-real-time...), and it seems to work well for them. People just have to keep in mind what each language excels at and know the drawbacks. Articles like yours help, so thanks for the good read.