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Most major PHP frameworks like laravel, symfony, Drupal, Magento develops all kinds of complex caching layers to work around PHP's stateless 1 request/1 execution model, essentially poorly recreating shared application state you would get for free with a long running worker process.

Python's import model is not without its flaws either, but at least you have a working application state, no need to fully initialize your app for every single request.

For simple apps that are contained within a few files, PHP is hard to beat for simplicity and speed.