Modern web applications or apis often handle heavy load tasks, requiring intense disk i/o or complex database queries. This talks demonstrates how and - more importantly - why such operations should be processed asynchronously. We will be checking out a few libraries that enable us to offload tasks and compare their pros and cons. Finally, we will cover some of the most common pitfalls and obstacles developers face when implementing asynchronous processing and face long running php processes for the first time. The code example is implemented in a simple symfony app but translates easily into other use cases.