CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqlexecbackground-process
Mitul Shah
Mitul Shah

Reputation: 1566

Running background process in PHP permanently

I'm creating a webservice for an Android app in PHP with MySQL. I want to continuously check whether any data is available. I haven't got any idea how to get data as a background process. How can I execute a query without any request or without calling file?

I searched and got some code like 

$command = "php -d max_execution_time=50 -f myfile.php '".$param."' >/dev/null &";
exec($command);

But where should I put this code so this query will run continuously?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2325

Answers (1)

halfer
halfer

Reputation: 20487

Yes, the ampersand trick will work. You can use something like supervisord to restart it every few hours, so that any memory leaks are dealt with. This also makes it less fragile if it were to crash or hang.

Also, you can use something like cron to run a task for 10 minutes, and then die off and wait for cron to start it again - bear in mind that with most background tasks, it doesn't matter if there's a short period the task is not running, since it will catch up. It's worth checking in each run whether the previous one is still running, and exit early if it is: that way you don't have two background tasks causing race-conditions when retrieving work from your database.

Finally you can use a job server, such as Gearman. This will allow you to send tasks to it in an asynchronous fashion, and they will be run by worker tasks (in either time or priority order). This is probably the most reliable approach, but it takes a bit more work to set up. There's a PHP module for this, but in my experience it's more of a hassle to use than Net_Gearman, which is available in PEAR.

Upvotes: 3

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