If you want to use libevent/libev without coding the glue yourself, you can use React PHP (http://reactphp.org/ http://reactphp.org/), which supports timers, we

If you want to use libevent/libev without coding the glue yourself, you can use React PHP (http://reactphp.org/ http://reactphp.org/), which supports timers, websocket/WAMP, ZeroMQ, HTTP (but not SSL), DNS, Redis (Predis async), and plain sockets. I'm using it for a project I'm working on because PHP has the only supported cpanel client library, and I don't want to maintain my own bindings for cpanel. I've found that React works quite well for processing queues in PHP and notifying the client via websocket when events occur. I did introduce a Play/Akka scheduling daemon instead of hand rolling that in React, which simplifies the PHP worker greatly as it only needs to process jobs submitted over ZMQ, not read the database and update an internal list of jobs. I would love to try porting this application to HHVM when there is support for a libev/libevent/libuv extension that is compatible with React. I was not aware of the async database library in PHP, though it doesn't seem to be integrated with the React main loop implementation and might be some work to get it working. Are you aware of the difference between Mysqli and Mysqlnd and do you know when I should use either on of them. (I use PDO for database access and prefer the OO api it provides.)