NYCPHP Meetup

[Brian Dailey]

 From the last link: "Note that you should never attempt to use these 
process control forking functions when using a webserver; you should 
only fork applications when using the PHP command line client."

I guess that kind of answers my question. exec() might actually be the 
only solution, I'm not sure - it just seems somewhat untidy. I would 
have to log any failures as I go along, I guess.

As an explanation of what I'm doing...

I have a cache. If an item in the cache is more than a week old, I want 
to re-fetch the item. I could schedule a job to check for all week-old 
objects and re-fetch them, but I think it would be more efficient to 
only run the re-fetch if someone loads the cached item and it's more 
than a week old (it's ok if web user gets the old item on that 
occurance). I don't want to make the user wait for fetching the cached 
item. I'd like to hand it off to another script that fetches it in the 
background, and doesn't tie up the user with the operation.

I hope that clarifies what I'm trying to do. Perhaps exec() is my only 
option.

- Brian

Hans C. Kaspersetz wrote:
> Brian Dailey wrote:
>> Hey guys, my google-fu is failing me today so I thought I would turn 
>> to the brilliant minds of the NYPHP.
>>
>> What I'd like to do is be able to execute a php script in the 
>> background that does NOT impact the load time of the page itself. 
>> Something that runs in the background and doesn't tie up the web 
>> server. Does that make sense? Do any of you have any idea how one 
>> would accomplish this?
>>
> Fork off a php process and let it run separately.  I think Synder, Hans 
> Z and Hendry were doing this for a app a couple of years ago with some 
> success.  When the forked process is done it calls the original script 
> and reports.  But you have to be conscious of garbage processes.
> 
> http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php
> http://us3.php.net/pcntl
> http://www.electrictoolbox.com/article/php/process-forking/
> 
> Hans K
> New Jersey Web Design
> http://www.cyberxdesigns.com
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