2

So I have found a number of tutorials/guides for running a php script as a background process, but no matter which code I use, the process still appears visible in the browser.

What I am doing is triggering a script that may take 5-10 seconds to run (relies on a third party API). I put the trigger at the very bottom of the page so that the page appears to render completely, but I have noticed that the browser status bar still shows the page as loading until the script runs. Additionally, Firebug is showing one (random?) image as loading until the php script is completely finished running. I can view the script in top and it is running as a separate process. How can I get the browser to stop waiting for it to finish though?

The code I'm using currently is:

shell_exec('sleep 30 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null &');

I've also tried using exec() but there wasn't any difference.

Disclaimer: My final code will use /usr/bin/GET, sleep is just to be obvious about what's going on.

Brandon0
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5 Answers5

3

Here's a pretty minimal solution, based on http://php.net/features.connection-handling#71172 :

<?php
ob_end_clean();
ob_start();
?>
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>sleep test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>sleep test</h1>
<p>going to sleep</p>
</body>
</html>
<?php
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
ob_end_flush();
flush();
$start = date(DATE_RSS);
sleep(10);
file_put_contents('sleep-test.txt', $start."\n".date(DATE_RSS));
?>
  • This appears to work great for background-ing some code inside the same script. I think I can tweak my code to work with this. Thanks. – Brandon0 Nov 01 '10 at 18:05
  • AWESOME! thank you for the reference , great for bg handling – Benn Oct 20 '12 at 01:40
1

Trying adding nohup in front of the command. You need PHP to disconnect from the process and continue on. Normally, if a parent process ends, the child process is killed. nohup will prevent this, and also prevent php from waiting for the child process to finish.

shell_exec('nohup sleep 30 >/dev/null 2>&1 &');
Brent Baisley
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0

If it's a seemingly random image that doesn't stop loading, you might simply have a different issue altogether.

At the very least I would check which process is taking too long, and take it from there.

Evert
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  • True. Maybe the background process is using enough server resources that it can't finish sending the image. – Quasipickle Nov 01 '10 at 17:02
  • It's odd. The image is being displayed instantly, and the time it takes for the image to "load" (according to firebug) is directly tied to the time it takes the shell_exec() function to run. – Brandon0 Nov 01 '10 at 17:59
-1
ob_end_flush();

ignore_user_abort(1);

this two functions will help you if i rightly understand your problem.

jokz
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-1

This is not currently possible.

Undo
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anonymous
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