As time goes on and I play with behat more, I become a little less convinced by our recommended use of the php built in web server to run behat tests. The original idea was good - prevent people from running the tests on their real environments, but actually now I think most people are not using that method of running behat tests.

There are two reasons I think we should consider dropping it:

1) My perception (feeling, not backed by solid facts) is that the tests don't run as reliable on the php web server.
2) I think the two methods of setting up behat make things a little more confusing for newcomers. If we moved anyway from that approach, I think it'd simplify the learning curve a little.

I have reasons to believe it might be more than a feeling my point 1):

• The web server isn't designed to be used for production - and only serves one request at a time, serially
• On complex pages we load a hell of a lot of resources. Today I saw some unreliability on the multi-choice question editing page - that page loads 304 resources on my dev install. Some of that will be dev settings, and most may be cached, but I am sure this can have an impact
• Additionally, one would assume it has the potential to speed things up (most browsers can request up to 6 concurrent resources these days). Although I tested this and it didn't have an impact (I expect we are spending all benefit in waits).

Anyway, this is just an issue to get some thoughts, I think we should post on the forums too. And it'll be interesting to see if many people report using the php web server.

(ps. All I mean by remove support, is really to change our scripts/settings/docs, not to actually prevent you from using the php web server if you want to).