PHP has apcu as the in-memory cache

And it’s not a joke, PHP is actually the most secure runtime environment out there for web hosting, PRECISELY because of the shared-nothing architecture.

Faster runtimes exist, like Swoole and recently FrankenPHP, to do evented programming like Node JS. But let me tell ya — you risk all kinds of leaks, both of unfreed memory and of secrets, across requests. It ain’t worth it most of the time!