PHP Equivalent of setInterval Function

Question

I have a long running PHP script that looks something like this:

$myClass->myFunction('this takes 30 minutes to run');

I want to send a heartbeat every 30 seconds during the running of myFunction() to alert my application that the script is still running and did not fail.

In JavaScript, I can achieve this with setInterval(). I want to be able to do the same thing in PHP. Perhaps with a custom setInterval() function that looks like:

setInterval(function(){
    $myClass->addHeartbeat("still running");    
}, 30000);

Is this possible given the synchronous nature of PHP?

Use [`sleep()`](http://php.net/manual/en/function.sleep.php) — Jay Blanchard, Mar 30 '15 at 20:41
You cannot really do this with javascript considering it's single threaded. — Cthulhu, Mar 30 '15 at 20:42
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/70855/how-can-one-use-multi-threading-in-php-applications — Barmar, Mar 30 '15 at 20:44
Using an event loop, you can create a timer event that gets executed every X seconds. Using [LibEV](http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.html) and [PHP extension](https://github.com/m4rw3r/php-libev) to interact with it, the code becomes pretty trivial. It's much easier than threading example, and since you already have a daemon - I assume that using the event loop would be quite easy. — N.B., Mar 30 '15 at 21:09

Patrik Grinsvall · Answer 1 · 2015-03-30T20:56:40.107

-1

There isnt any easy way of doing this, but since you have a long running php script you can do something like this, assuming you have a main loop.:

while($running) { // long running main loop

    if(time() % 30 == 0) {
        $myClass->addHeartbeat("still running");
    }
    // your long running phpscript code
}

edited Mar 30 '15 at 20:56

answered Mar 30 '15 at 20:43

Patrik Grinsvall

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But this will never execute the rest of the code in the script, it will just get stuck in this loop. – Barmar Mar 30 '15 at 20:44

PHP Equivalent of setInterval Function

1 Answers1