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Something I pick on with PHP is because requests are so isolated, it doesn't have a good story for pooling SQL and HTTP connections. Its model really limits you when it comes to sharing resources between requests.

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It's possible to have persistent MySQL connections, but there's all kinds of caveats; MySQL connections are stateful, so bad things can happen, and the performance benefits are only very slight. https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.persistent-connection...

This is indeed a downside but there are workarounds -- The wikimedia foundation put out a good blog post talking about getting HTTP connection pooling for PHP

https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2020/10/26/impact-of-using-ht...

TLDR they used envoy proxy as a sidecar container. So to your point its a pain but still achievable

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