EGreg

This is an all-in one server. It even handles websockets with socket.io 5 compatibility! Yes, without it, people would additionally resort to Node for socket support and maybe Redis for message passing. One of the features is that this server finally handles it all. PHP for everything!

As far as the landing page — there are truly many features that this webserver enables. That’s why the website lists 9 categories and links to other pages. It also has expandable sections like “how can it be this fast?”

I do use LLMs in my toolchain, to generate text and code, and compilers to generate code, but I also cover it heavily with automated tests and also battle-test it in my own environments on actual workloads. I mean sheesh, I am literally sharing it so that you can download and run it yourself, and if you run into something obscure on your environment, report any issues and it’ll be fixed.

What happens is that I have the documentation and front facing websites also generated by LLMs. And many people commenting here didn’t even bother to click through and download the actual software or try it. If you did, you would have seen the tests, and example apps. You would have seen the graphicsl UX and dashboard the server itself enables. The fact that no one even mentioned it suggests to me that the people commenting are ones cutting corners. So me using more automation in addition to compiles and test suites isn’t the issue, if you are unwilling so much as to run it before opining publicly about it. Based solely on a README file.

In particular, this server allows people (like the entrepreneurs on HN) to handle 100x as many simultaneous users than current php-fpm, or be as safe as php-fpm while being as fast as Swoole, Roadrunner, FrankenPHP. Try it.

PS: the same thing happened here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665345

The README is no longer than nginx documentation, though, or many manfiles of programs. The README explains all the features in one file, with results of actual benchmarks. I asked it to put emojis in there as well.

I use LLMs in my toolchain, same as I also use compilers. In fact, I use the LLMs to generate end-to-end test suites, and the test running is automated as well.

These examples include support for socket.io and rooms, which I highly doubt existed in the 90s. So the webserver can be used not just to serve HTTP requests to 40,000 simultaneous online users, but also have an entirely in-memory real-time chat server for 40,000 users (or anything more complex).

After over a decade of writing apps in PHP, I always wondered why we needed all that extra tooling around it just to serve websites. I suspected PHP alone could be faster. I didn’t realize how right I was.

This is an entire webserver and socket server written in pure PHP, meaning you can run web applications without nginx for serving files and websites, certbot for certificates, cron for periodic tasks, node for realtime sockets, etc. It comes out of the box with a user friendly dashboard and control panel, too. There are even standalone binaries you can download for Linux and MacOS that can contain your entire web application:

https://github.com/Qbix/webserver

Originally it was much faster than php-fpm, but now it is also faster than even the fastest PHP runtimes. And unlike those runtimes, it is able to run existing PHP apps without modification!

It’s not slop. It has been tested to be faster than every other PHP webserver. Here is HOW it can be this fast:

The vast majority of PHP apps make blocking I/O calls (to the database, files, network calls etc) While that happens, the thread is blocked.

FrankenPHP, Swoole, amphp and others take the “evented” approach which is much faster, but require all I/O calls to be rewritten to use their async libraries. But most existing PHP code would need a lot of work to be ported to async style, and even if it was, sometimes the async libraries don’t handle everything the mainstream ones do.

Qbix Webserver takes a different approach: it spawns hundreds, sometimes thousands of processes on Linux, Mac etc. When a process is blocked waiting on I/O, the rest of the application can handle thousands of concurrent users.

The reason this works is that that Qbix server allows apps to preload files and classes before it forks the worker processes. It can do this while being written in pure PHP.

While php-fpm can prefork workers, this causes each worker to take up a lot of memory, eg 40MB, duplicating all the bytecode from your entire framework and app. By contrast, Qbix Webserver is able to spawn workers that are around 140KB each for a typical Wordpress app. This is because pcntl_fork on Linux and MacOS only copies on write, so 4-16KB memory pages are only copied when you make a change to a variable. If all the variables are on one page (eg in one array) you can even have workers weighing 4-16KB total, allowing you to run TENS OF THOUSANDS of workers on a 4GB machine.

If you use composer install amphp, your code will use epoll instead, causing your app on Qbix Server to be even more efficient.

This is 2026. It would be great if your PHP was able to work with the latest socket.io and handle rooms and socket connections. Imagine a chat server that’s entirely in memory, and also able to handle 40,000 simultaneous users and connections.

Well, now you can. Qbix Webserver handles HTTP Requests, Websockets and rooms, even HTTP Push (for streaming AI tokens etc).

It also can manage your TLS certificates, run cron jobs, and more.

It supports headers like X-Accel-Redirect which lets you serve files with access control done by your app. (Though these aren’t as fast as nginx because PHP lacks support for sendfile, so if you want additional 2x boost in speed for protected static files, you should proxy these headers to NGINX. For public static files, just use a CDN.)

It even supports something new I invented, X-Cache-Tree allowing your code to cache parts of a webpage. Yes, that’s right — you are no longer required to render an entire page again if only a couple parts of it got invalidated. The X-Cache-Invalidate header can intelligently invalidate many pages at the same time!

Instead of hating on it, why not try it?

Visit github and grab the actual server. Launch it with PHP, and use the visual dashboard in your browser to manage your apps. Enjoy! It’s MIT licensed

A good framework can maybe cache some of this with the opcode cache, and apcu. Saving some milliseconds.

But regardless of all this, each worker process takes up a lot of memory (the entire framework, etc) which is often megabytes. By contrast, the Qbix webserver forks after you have loaded the classes. Being written in PHP actually gives it an advantage — the workers become much smaller and you can run 100x of them.

This accomplishes what no other PHP webserver has managed to do: give you the speed of Swoole / FrankenPHP while at the samw time let you run unmodified PHP scripts in a “shared-nothing” fork environment, maintaining the strict isolation PHP is known for, so there are no memory leaks or data leaks between requests.

Speaking of that, check out the “full-stack microservice” architecture that allows you to isolate your sensitive credentials / config from the main PHP process, preventing a host of attacks.

The tests here were also done on one core. Although I am skeptical that PHP after so many years, on much faster CPUs, cannot outperform Java from 20 years ago on slower CPUs.

PS: I wrote a language called U that you can transpile PHP into - and it speeds things up by another factor of 10x even over this webserver, because it’s a compiled language and it transpiles pctl_fork() into something that doesn’t require the OS forking processes (so it works even on Windows):

https://ulanguage.org

This fork mode is exactly for the type of unmofoeid code you’re talking about — which may have some thing not reset between requests. It is still capable of 10-100x more throughout than PHP-FPM, even in its “prefork” mode. This is a “post-fork” if you will.

The code is compatibke with PHP all the way down to 5, so this webserver can be run on any PHP environment from the last 15 years.

About 213 million people live in this zone, so 2/3 of people in the USA. So I guess the 4th amendment doesn't actually apply to most US citizens?

But in terms of security and reliability, U's linter and compiler enforces that.

But I just released a language called U, and I was surprised to see this one.

https://ulanguage.org

We're talking about replacing most uses of Agents with uses of Workflows. That's the key first step, without which the industry will cry "don't regulate us... do you want China to WIN???"

“If we ban CFCs now the Chinese will win!”

“If we ban chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, etc etc our enemies will triumph! They won’t stop!”

“If we switch to biodegradeable plastic then our rivals will have an advantage.”

“If we dont externalize the costs to our population, then they will, and then will win!”

I think workflows can do the job agents do, 20x cheaper and more predictably and safely. They can completely displace agents, just as HFCs displaced CFCs and then we were able to ban CFCs and phase them out through international COOPERATION. The language of COOPERATION is what saves us vs COMPETITION is all about cutting corners and externalizing costs. Google the Montreal Protocol, Geneva Conventions, Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, Unleaded Gasoline etc etc.

Agents have got to be marginalized. They are just popular because the labs need to make a ton of money for their investors and recoup their massive spending on training models.

When you perpetrate a huge hacking job with thousands of attackers — but it’s magic agent swarms

I think the reason is that the paper frames malicious AI use as a policy problem, recommending social solutions. It's actually an architecture problem.

Every generation of computing has hit a version of this. Programs could write anywhere in memory - we added protected memory. Programs could hog the CPU - we added preemptive multitasking. Desktop apps could call any OS function - the iPhone sandboxed them. Nobody asked programs to please behave, the containment actually went into the infrastructure.

AI skipped that step entirely. We went straight to open-ended agents with broad permissions and tried to make them safe through alignment and prompting. I've been researching this for the past year and I think alignment is necessary but not sufficient, because the intelligence increasingly isn't in the model. It's in the substrate - the harness, the domain knowledge, the tooling around the model. I actually measured this on real coding tasks: Sonnet with a code-derived index outperformed the frontier model (Opus 5.8) exploring on its own, and the top-tier model (Fable) refused the real work entirely! The cheap model with the right rig beat the expensive model without one. https://safebots.ai/matchup.html

If that's true then aligning the model doesn't solve the problem. A bad actor who can't get the best model just uses Sonnet. Or Llama. Or Kimi. The weights have already leaked and bits don't degrade - you can't recall them the way you can stop manufacturing CFCs.

So what do you actually do? Same thing that worked for CFCs. You gotta first build the safe version — in this case, declarative workflows running in sealed compute environments — and prove it handles 99% of actual use cases at lower cost. Let it win commercially. Then regulate the dangerous version. DuPont developed HFC refrigerants first. The Montreal Protocol became possible BECAUSE of that. The ban became politically viable because the alternative already existed.

I've been building this alternative for the past 8 months: https://safebots.ai/about

We can only hope. Your original engagement was very rude.

I think it is incredibly rude to go on a SHOW HN where a person may have (as in this case) spent months on an actual project and finally shows it, only to completely ignore everything about the actual project and snarkily announcs to everyone that it was “TL;DR” or these days “it smelled like LLM wrote the front page, so I didnt read anything! Haha nyeh nyeh.”

Imagine someone raised a child to play the piano, they ask you to listen to their performance and you leave a comment “didn’t bother watching — the thumbnail sucks, and this child is wearing unappealing clothing”.

In real life, you’d never do that. You know it’s wrong. You would probably get ostracized and rightly considered a jerk or in any case the parents would really take it badly.

You can just privately ignore the post. But to announce it as the first comment and make sure everyone else sees it — I would never shit on people’s projects like that.

In frustration, I left your exact comment on another SHOW HN that happened to have a nice AI-generated page, but the difference was … it was already trending and had many comments, so my comment barely registered.

So I did what you did — which was wrong and uncouth — but on something where it was the 20th comment, all the way on the bottom.

But here’s the best part. Then you show up, and explain, in your self-righteous way, that, you see, actually, what you did was right, but the exact same comment on another AI-generated website is totally wrong, because of ad-hoc nuance analysis you just made up. And everyone should be aware of this exact nuance, which you are now handwaving, because you are morally right and the other person than you shit on is morally wrong.

Suffice it to say that I think your whole analysis is backwards. What you did was rude, and what I did was a milder version of that. The bad faith is you then trying to further invent nuance as to why what you did is great and I’m in bad faith. Sorry buddy. Totally backwards.

Guess what else the LLM generated. An entire compiler for a new language. Over 7 months of work went into that, iterating, fixing bugs, simplifying. It generates WASM you can run in your browser. All you have to do is visit the playground. It's the big button that says "Try it in your browser." But, that playground and the backend was also generated by an LLM (as I iterated for a few months on it).

I couldn't get it any simpler. The landing page has big letters on the top. It has tiny code snippets illustrating what the language is like. Oh well. I tried.

The AI is only going to increase on all forums from here. There's no stopping it, because on most forums people will start preferring AI in many areas

When all is said and done it will be he, not AOC or Bernie or any "Green New Deal" folks, that will be remembered by history as the president who did more to get people off fossil fuels than any other.

https://magarshak.com/blog/why-im-confident-in-my-views/

The LLMs are trained to often be more pessimistic off the bat than the humans. But you can wear them down with arguments and they change their mind.

Here is an example where I have pushed my ideas in areas where I am not an expert, and generated papers to submit to conferences in order to get them peer reviewed BY experts: https://magarshak.com/papers.html

This is exactly what you’re talking about, except done very carefully.

https://x.com/ParkerThayer/status/2097759699626328575

but then how would you explain this, are they all "in on it"?

https://x.com/TaylorPopielarz/status/2097710620187455954