PHP does preforking first of all. You have about 30 "threads" sitting around, able to handle 30 clients. This is STILL not the same as evented programming, which lets you send out these requests and wait.
Speaking of -- have you ever heard of evented i/o?
Let me put it this way ... threads and workers are good for handling incoming requests (one worker per request). But for outgoing requests, it's nice to have evented i/o!
