Since about a year we're mostly using PHP's built-in web server for TYPO3 projects.
I've posted a how-to run TYPO3 on PHP dev server with switchable PHP versions.
The built-in server "is not intended to be a full-featured web server" however it brings everything you need for running most PHP applications - including TYPO3. Yesterday I learned one of its limitations the hard way.
When trying to index a page onto a Apache Solr search server using the solr TYPO3 extension - the indexing took forever and produced timeout error messages.
After hours(!) of debugging, I found the reason: PHP's built-in web server is single threaded. That means that while it is processing one request it can not start another one.
Why is that a problem? When indexing a page the solr extension fires requests to the frontend to retreive a fully rendered page, but it can not be rendered because there's already a process running the indexer - so it gets stuck.
The problem should also affect extensions like crawler or pagepath and potentially other TYPO3 functions.
I have not found a way around it so far. If you need to index pages with the solr extension or need concurrent PHP requests for other reasons, I suggest you look for another local PHP environment.
Update: A way to get around this is to spawn a separate PHP process. E.g. I now run php -S 127.0.0.1:8082 which I use for the TYPO3 backend and php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 for the frontend. That does the trick. Thanks to Helmut for coming up with the workaround idea.
Sebastian Michaelsen
Maschinenraum