Comments on: How To Run A PHP Script In The Background

By: ShavedApe

ShavedApe — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:12:40 +0000

Just wanted to say a big thank you been looking to do this for so long but couldnt find a way other than exec() and I could never get that to work the way I wanted the backgroundPost() has helped me massively so thank you

By: Hamad

Hamad — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:31:34 +0000

Thank you man I’ve been looking for this for ages

I’m working on a web crawler script that takes a long time to finish, which causes the connection to timeout.
Thanks to you I can do it now without the user thinking the website has faild.

I still can get the progress of the process by using a shared sessions variable and ajax to pull the current progress results.

By: White Shadow

White Shadow — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:29:04 +0000

It already passes any parameters via POST, though it may not be immediately obvious. What it does is take the query string (e.g. “file=some_file.dat” in the example) and sends it as the body of the POST request. This means the requested file will see it as $_POST['file'].

This may not be an optimal solution, but it should be pretty easy to change if you need to – change the function to take another arguments (e.g. $params, an array) and replace line 16 with something like

$out .= http_build_query($params);

By: xendex

xendex — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:13:26 +0000

Thanks for the exelent solution, White Shadow.
I have a question about 2nd solution: how can I pass additional arguments via $_POST method(not GET like http://example.com/slow.php?file=some_file.dat) to the requested php-file? Need some example, please.

By: vibha

vibha — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:17:01 +0000

Thnx….it works !!!!!!!!!!!!

By: ø How To Run A PHP Script In The Background | W-Shadow.com ø

ø How To Run A PHP Script In The Background | W-Shadow.com ø — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 16:10:20 +0000

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By: Um jeito fácil de realizar requisições assíncronas com PHP | José Ricardo

Um jeito fácil de realizar requisições assíncronas com PHP | José Ricardo — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:41:46 +0000

[...] [1] http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/10/16/how-to-run-a-php-script-in-the-background [...]

By: White Shadow

White Shadow — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:25:06 +0000

No problem

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:37:35 +0000

Yes Arnie, that is worrying me as well, so I tried something novel and actually read the fsockopen documentation (http://us2.php.net/fsockopen). The comment from “joe at edwardsconsultants dot com 10-Aug-2003 09:56″ clued me into prepending the host with “ssl://” in the fsockopen call and now my code is happy (as am I). So, for HTTPS, prepend the host and use port 443 (if you get stuck, use comment #12 debug as suggested):

function backgroundPost($url){
$parts=parse_url($url);

$fp = fsockopen(’ssl://’.$parts['host'],
isset($parts['port'])?$parts['port']:443,
$errno, $errstr, 30);

if (!$fp) {
return false;
} else {
$out = “POST “.$parts['path'].” HTTP/1.1\r\n”;
$out.= “Host: “.$parts['host'].”\r\n”;
$out.= “Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n”;
$out.= “Content-Length: “.strlen($parts['query']).”\r\n”;
$out.= “Connection: Close\r\n\r\n”;
if (isset($parts['query'])) $out.= $parts['query'];

fwrite($fp, $out);
fclose($fp);
return true;
}
}

Thanks to Whiteshadow for a great idea and all of the follow up!

By: Arnie Shore

Arnie Shore — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:17:15 +0000

There’s a potential skunk at the ajax picnic that I, for one, occasionally forget – it’s the two-channels limit thing. (If some of you have tried to test-drive this issue, pls let us know – I haven’t taken the time.)

When it rears its ugly head it’s simply a hang – or unexpected delay – which can be really difficult to trace. It bears thinking about while building an application.

I’d asked on the GMaps API group re how Google seems to solve that, and the answer I got was that the limit is per-server; you may have noticed that Google employs several server addr’s (MT1, MT2, etc.) to help solve it. Which makes sense but which not all of us can do.