PHP Background Processes

Well, you can use "ignore_user_abort(true)"

So the script will continue to work (keep an eye on script duration, perhaps add "set_time_limit(0)")

But a warning here: You will not be able to stop a script with these two lines:

ignore_user_abort(true); 
set_time_limit(0);

Except you can directly access the server and kill the process there! (Been there, done an endless loop, calling itself over and over again, made the server come to a screeching stop, got shouted at...)

Sounds like you should have a queue and an external script for processing the queue.

For example, your PHP script should put an entry into a database table and return right away. Then, a cron running every minute checks the queue and forks a process for each job.

The advantage here is that you don't lock an apache thread up for 10 minutes.

I had lots of issues with this sort of process under windows; My situation was a little different in that I didn't care about the response of the "script"- I wanted the script to start and allow other page requests to go through while it was busy working away.

For some reason; I had issues with it either hanging other requests or timing out after about 60 seconds (both apache and php were set to time out after about 20 minutes); It also turns out that firefox times out after 5 minutes (by default) anyway so after that point you can't know what's going on through the browser without changing settings in firefox.

I ended up using the process open and process close methods to open up a php in cli mode like so:

pclose(popen("start php myscript.php", "r"));

This would ( using start ) open the php process and then kill the start process leaving php running for however long it needed - again you'd need to kill the process to manually shut it down. It didn't need you to set any time outs and you could let the current page that called it continue and output some more details.

The only issue with this is that if you need to send the script any data, you'd either do it via another source or pass it along the "command line" as parameters; which isn't so secure.

Worked nicely for what we needed though and ensures the script always starts and is allowed to run without any interruptions.

I think shell_exec command is what you are looking for.

However, it is disables in safe mode.

The PHP manual article about it is here: http://php.net/shell_exec

There is an article about it here: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2007/01/12/running-a-background-process-in-php/

There is another option which you can use, run the script CLI...It will run in the background and you can even run it as a cronjob if you want.

e.g

> #!/usr/bin/php -q

<?php

//process logs

?>

This can be setup as a cronjob and will execute with no time limitation....this examples is for unix based operation system though.

FYI I have a php script running with an infinite loop which does some processing and has been running for the past 3 months non stop.

You could use ignore_user_abort() - that way the script will continue to run even if you close your browser or go to a different page.

Just call StartBuffer() before any output, and EndBuffer() when you want client to close connection. The code after calling EndBuffer() will be executed on server without client connection.

    private function StartBuffer(){
        @ini_set('zlib.output_compression',0);
        @ini_set('implicit_flush',1);
        @ob_end_clean();
        @set_time_limit(0);
        @ob_implicit_flush(1);
        @ob_start();
    }

    private function EndBuffer(){
        $size = ob_get_length();
        header("Content-Length: $size");
        header('Connection: close');
        ob_flush();ob_implicit_flush(1);
    }