frankenphp VS crontab

Uses the new FrankenPHP server to add SSL support to your local environment

Depending on the application you can already do this. For example: https://frankenphp.dev/

File size of binaries is almost never a relevant factor. Your server running your code is probably not so constrained on disk space that it would matter. It's not like it's gigabytes, it's only ~110MB. See the assets on the latest release: https://github.com/dunglas/frankenphp/releases/tag/v1.0.0

A new player is entering the game: FrankenPHP. This is a new application server which can be used instead of Apache or nginx.

Don't follow any advice to use Apache as a reverse proxy, or bundle php with a classic web server.

There are real application servers using an event loop by now, most notably Roadrunner (https://roadrunner.dev), FrankenPHP (https://frankenphp.dev), Laravel Octane (https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/octane#introduction), Swoole Bridge for Symfony (https://github.com/insidestyles/swoole-bridge-bundle).

In general, you can do a lot with OpenSwoole or Roadrunner. They are vastly superior (in a container scenario) to any other suggestion in this thread!

And up-and-comer is https://frankenphp.dev/ which invokes PHP directly from a Go server (as a plugin for Caddy) using CGO. Not quite stable yet, but it's looking good and lots of progress has been made. Disclosure: I work on Caddy :)

d. swoole in-memory cache -> is way more performant than redis. if your application needs some data from database, -> you could use package like hyperf/cron to pre-cache the database call and re-cache using this internal cron without doing it during consumer API call.