During execution of a php webservice, i need to detach a "time consuming function" to maintain a quick response to the user. That's an example of the flow :
I know that php does not manage multi-thread operation by itself, but anyway there are some other methods to works in async way.
Googling and here on stackoverflow i have found a possible solution in the shell_exec command.
i have create this example to simulate the flow:
service.php
$urlfile=dirname(__FILE__)."/timefile.php";
$cmd = 'nohup nice -n 10 php -f '.$urlfile.' > log/file.log & printf "%u" $!';
$pid = shell_exec($cmd);
echo $pid;
timefile.php
sleep(10);
$urlfile=dirname(__FILE__)."/logfile.txt";
$myfile = fopen($urlfile, "a");
$txt = time()."\n";
fwrite($myfile, $txt);
fclose($myfile);
The code is only an example ( it writes into a txt file ) and it works asynchronous.
The flow will be upload on a Centos server with php and mysql installed. In real life timefile.php will execute from 3 to 6 curl call, i can estimate an execution time (for the entire file) of 30 seconds. Timefile.php will not act as a daemon, it will executed without only one time when it is called, so it will not remain open with a infinite while loop for instance.
The webservice ( i hope ) will be call many times ( i can estimate 1000 times each hour ).
My question is :
This approach ( with shell_exec as the example shows ) is advised when there are many call or maybe it leads in server's performance problems (maybe something like zombie alloc or some kind of configured limitation) ? There is a better way to manage this task using php , apache and Centos ?
