[watermelon0]

If 95% of what app does is calling a DB, then the bottleneck is in the DB, not with the PHP.

You can use persistent DB connections, and app server such as FrankenPHP to persist state between requests, but that still wouldn't help if DB is the bottleneck.

[imron]

Sometimes it’s still the app:

   rows = select all accounts
   for each row in rows:
       update row

But that’s not necessarily a PHP problem. N+1 queries are everywhere.

[silon42]

Depending on what you are doing, the above is not necessarily bad.. often much better than an SQL that locks an entire table (potentially blocking the whole DB, if this is one of the key tables).