[tyingq]

PHP these days doesn't fork and spawn a new process, though it does create a new interpreter context.

In the old cgi-bin days, every web request would fork and exec a new script, whether PHP, Perl, C program, etc. That was replaced with Apache modules (or nsapi, etc), then later, with long running process pooled frameworks like fcgi, php-fpm, etc. Perl and PHP typically then didn't fork for every request. But did create a fresh interpreter context to be backward compatible, avoid memory leaks, etc. So there's still overhead, but not as heavy as fork/exec.