> as slow as PHP is.

Citation needed? I love hating PHP, but of the reasons I would chose something other than PHP, speed and resource consumption is pretty far down the list?

PHP is sync. This means every IO operation i do runs sync. This is why PHP will always be the slowest ones out there. Open a file, SQL queries, sending emails etc. Its all sync. Its all slow.

PS. I fully aware of hacks around this like reactphp and the other related async things, but those are all just heavy dependencies and for most sane devs non starters.