Wordpress on Luther Monson

Calling Rust From PHP Without a Socket, Part 2: Making Existing Code Use It

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:55:00 -0700

Part 1 covered the plumbing. ePHPm registers ephpm_kv_* and ephpm_db_* functions that call straight into Rust. A cache read through one costs about a tenth of a microsecond instead of a loopback round trip. That’s nice and also useless on its own. Nobody is going to rewrite their WordPress object cache or their Laravel cache store around a function called ephpm_kv_set(). Applications talk to existing APIs instead:

Redis through phpredis or Predis
the cache through PSR-6/16 or wp_cache_*
the database through wpdb, mysqli, Eloquent or DBAL

So there’s a set of Composer packages in the ephpm org whose whole job is to sit under those APIs and route them to the native functions. This post covers what’s in them and the rule that decides when they switch on. It also covers the bugs that only showed up once real applications ran on top.

Zero-Dependency Deployments - Single Binary for WordPress

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:25:00 -0700

The standard way to run a WordPress site is four services:

nginx for HTTP and TLS
php-fpm to run PHP
MySQL for data
Redis, once the site gets slow enough that someone installs an object cache plugin

That’s four processes and four config files. There are three sockets between them and four things to upgrade. For a big site that’s fine. For a brochure site or a staging copy it’s absurd. The same goes for a PR preview, a box at the edge, or a CI job that needs a real WordPress to test a plugin against.

What Does One More WordPress Site Cost?

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:20:00 -0700

ePHPm v0.7.0 shipped per-site multi-tenancy. Point [server] sites_dir at a directory and every Host maps to its own docroot and its own Turso database file. One process serves all of them. The first question anybody asks about that is “how many sites fit on a box?” The honest way to answer it is to turn the question around. What does one more site cost? If you know the marginal RAM, file descriptors, CPU and disk for a tenant, the box size falls out of arithmetic.

Faking MySQL's Quirks Well Enough to Fool WordPress

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:50:00 -0700

Last month I wrote about running SQLite behind a MySQL socket with litewire. I ended on “passing an install suite is not the same thing as behaving like MySQL”. That turned out to be accurate. On August 10th a few things happened at once:

I put a real WordPress 7.0.3 site through a benchmark on ePHPm.
I A/B tested the new in-process database bridge against the wire path.
I started building ephpm/db-wordpress, a wpdb drop-in that talks to the database in-process instead of over a socket.

Between them they produced six litewire issues in about three hours. None of them broke the install. All of them made WordPress quietly do the wrong thing.

Building a Custom SAPI - How PHP Actually Talks to the Outside World

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:18:00 -0700

If you’ve only ever run PHP behind nginx, you’ve probably never had to think about how echo reaches a socket. When you embed PHP like ePHPm does, it’s the first thing you have to answer. The answer is a SAPI. There is very little written about implementing one. Most of what I know came from reading sapi/cli, sapi/cgi and sapi/embed in php-src. Then I found out which parts I’d misread. This is the write-up I wanted back in March.

SQLite as a Production Database via Protocol Translation

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 20:40:00 -0700

Most of the PHP sites I’d put on ePHPm don’t need a MySQL server. A brochure WordPress, an internal Laravel tool, a preview environment that lives for an afternoon. What they do need is something that looks like MySQL, because mysqli and pdo_mysql are the only database drivers their code has ever been pointed at. I mentioned this in the ePHPm pragmatism post as a one-paragraph “because”. This is the longer version, now that WordPress 7.0 and Laravel 13 both install and run end to end on it.