Efficient and performant applications are fantastic; they keep server load, costs and response times low. We can make our web applications more efficient by removing the repetitive bootstrapping process from the request-response cycle.
"How?" I hear you ask!
By using FastCGI we can keep our application alive between requests and vastly improve their performance. The best news is that if you're using a Request-Response framework (such as Symfony) you can probably do this to your application by adding one line to your composer dependencies file.
Let us not get too excited, however! When using PHP in this way we have to be very careful about the design and configuration of our application! This talk will explain how to use FastCGI with our applications safely, providing an overview of the process and highlighting the danger areas that we must be cautious of.
@emmajane
Thanks for the brilliant and comprehensive feedback. I've made some revisions based on what you've said but I'm not sure I'm happy with the first paragraph yet. I'll have a reread this evening when it's not so fresh in my head!