Hi,
I’ve been searching and searching… but could not come up with something interesting.
From within a script, I’d like to perform a couple of HTTP requests to external ressources. However, I’d like this script to execute as fast as possible and some of these external ressources may take up to a few seconds before sending a response. So I just would like to send data via HTTP, and don’t wait for any response.
Is that feasible? Where should I dig?
Regards,
jj- 
of course it’s feasible:
Sets the timeout value on stream , expressed in the sum of seconds and microseconds . Returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.
When the stream times out, the ‘timed_out’ key of the array returned by stream_get_meta_data() is set to TRUE, although no error/warning is generated.
But it needs PHP5.
Or maybe you could use curl with PHP4 and play with the timeout value.
Simply set it to a very low value (like 500 ms), and if it times out, then you continue.
Simple as pie.
Run an external script.
Thanks to you both.
@sk89q: In the case of an external script, what would be the command line to pass to the function you linked to?
Well, if the external script is a shell script written in either PHP, Perl, shell, etc. and you have the appropriate shebang line (plus the right file permissions), then you just use the path to the script.
/path/to/your/script.php
Otherwise, you can call the PHP/etc. interpreter and pass the path to the PHP/etc. file:
/usr/bin/php /path/to/your/script.php
I’m having a few problems getting it working…
Here’s my main script. It executes a script in the background and don’t wait for it to be completed before proceeding.
index.php:
function execInBackground($cmd) {
if (substr(php_uname(), 0, 7) == "Windows"){
pclose(popen("start /B ". $cmd, "r"));
}
else {
exec($cmd . " > /dev/null &");
}
}
execInBackground('sleep.php');
die('reached');
In the same directory, I have sleep.php, the script executed in the background. It should write a little something into write.php.
sleep(5);
$fp = fopen('write.php', 'a');
fwrite($fp, 'reached'. "\
");
fclose($fp);
But… nothing gets written. What could be the issues?
Thanks again for your help
Use full filepaths.
Both in the command and in the fopen call.
Well, you don’t have to use an absolute path. To call a file in the same current directory, you need to prepend the path with ./ to indicate that you actually want to execute it.
./sleep.php
If those external scripts take a while to process, you shouldn’t call them from the same process as the one serving a http request.
The best way to deal with this, is to create a cronjob, that runs independently of your web-frontend, and then use a database table as create a queue for communicating between the two processes. (Or, if you don’t care about the result, just a one-way communication). This has a couple of positive side effects, such as the queue doubling as a logfile (Don’t delete entries, when they are processed - just mark them as done), and generally decouples unrelated responsibilities in you application.
@crm: tried, didn’t work (I checked with FILE to make sure there was no mistake).
@sk89q: prepend the ./ still nothing…
–> When I call sleep.php url-style, the scripts does what it has to do. SO the problem is really located in the execInBackground() part.
@kyber: sounds great. However, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’d know how to do it. If you have time to elaborate a little, I’d be happy to learn from you.
Oh, I forgot to check this:
You need the shebang line at the top of your file:
#!/usr/bin/env php
Second, sleep.php needs to be chmodded 0755.
You might also need to make sure that the script is using UNIX line endings.
Regarding kyberfabrikken’s suggestion, you would do it by having a cronjob task that runs at a specified interval. If you want a task done, you put an entry in a queue you store somewhere, such as in your database. The cronjob task, when it runs, checks if there’s anything in the queue that needs to be done and whether a task is already running. If there’s nothing to do, the cronjob task will just quit. Otherwise, if there’s stuff to do in the queue and nothing is currently being processed, it would perform a task from the queue.
You can also do it another way using a server modal where you have a server running all the time that takes requests for tasks and completes queued tasks until there is nothing left to do. If the server runs out of tasks to do, the server would just sleep. This would be ideal with a high amount of traffics and a server cluster setup.
The advantage of this method is that you won’t have fifty tasks running simultaneously because fifty people happened to access that particular webpage. If the case was video encoding, you’d have 50 video encoders going simultaneously, eating up all your precious CPU.
Thanks for your patience
Right now, this is how it looks.
index.php:
<?php
//die(__FILE__);
function execInBackground($cmd) {
if (substr(php_uname(), 0, 7) == "Windows"){
//die('windows');
pclose(popen("start /B ". $cmd, "r"));
}
else {
//die('not windows');
exec($cmd . " > /dev/null &");
}
}
chmod('./sleep.php', 0755);
execInBackground('./sleep.php'); //also tried with full path
die('reached');
?>
sleep.php
#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
sleep(2);
$fp = fopen('write.php', 'a');
fwrite($fp, 'reached'. "\
");
fclose($fp);
?>
write.php is just an empty file…
Again, nothing gets written on write.php. I don’t know how to check UNIX line endings, to tell you the truth.
About the cron, it sounds very interesting but I’m not sure it would be useful on this project.
Here’s more precisely what I’m trying to do: I have endless loops (php scripts) communicating with a remote server (we need to have them send data to this server every 60 seconds or so). I am now trying to switch on/off these endless loops from an admin CP. So I call a “loop handler” script which does various checks before executing the loop script it is told to execute or telling the loop to stop, depending on the state of the loop, of course (which is determined by the various checks the “loop handler” script does).
sk89q described it nicely. I’d like to add though, that a server model (daemon) is not something I would recommend as the first choice. PHP is notoriously bad at leaking memory, so long running processes can cause trouble. If you need to constantly process data, or you need it to process right away, it works better than a cronjob though. In both cases, using a database table as a queue works well. If you use a a database with locking support, you can make the setup safe for multiple processes, which can be helpful if you ever need to scale up on performance.
I-ll look into it, definitevely. And thanks a lot for the advice. How typically would you set a cron? Write one in C++ / Java?
I still think that, for the time being, a background execution would fit my purpose and would be lighter. I’ll start with it, while looking into cron.
Log in to the server over telnet/ssh and type crontab -e
The format is explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron
Login to SSH / your shell and go to the folder where sleep.php resides.
Try executing
./sleep.php
If it works, then try
exec("./sleep.php");
in PHP. That won’t run the script as a background task, but we need to see if it works to begin with.
Thank you so much for your patience
This is how my master file now looks:
pclose(popen("./sleep.php", "r"));
exec("./sleep.php");
die('RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR');
None of it worked…
What is the server api? Do a phpinfo() by running the script via url.
What is the OS?
Server API: Apache 2.0 Handler
System: Windows NT
Find the correct paths to fill in.
echo exec('C:\\php\\php-win.exe C:\\ws\\htdocs\ .php');
You may not have php-win, just use php.exe then.
t.php contains
<?php
echo 'i am t';