Now imagine a whole web server written in PHP (ie. nanoserv), say, using
libevent as the network backend, running the above described real-time web
implementation. Alternatively, you could perhaps even wire it into worker/event
model of apache/other servers instead of rolling your own. It sounds quite powerful,
and development-effort-wise cheap - out of a mere HTML preprocessor!
PHP works fine in Apahce worker now if you know what you are doing and don't do stupid things with PHP in a web environment. Keep all the stupid stuff in Gearman, cron or non-threaded servers.
This is just not what PHP is for.
Brian.