We all know how good horizontal scaling is. We also know that PHP is born single threaded, and therefore it’s not the best available tool for heavy processing or intensive batch jobs. In this talk we’ll see how to get through these shortcomings, achieving parallel processing through native solutions such as Process control functions and POSIX functions, but also exploiting more recent techniques such as message queues and nonblocking I/O. We’ll cover a wide range of examples from real world applications, and dealing with tools such as Gearman, RabbitMQ, ReactPHP and Icicle.