CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptphpcron
Sarah
Sarah

Reputation: 83

Alternatives to executing a script using cron job every second?

I have a radio station at Tunein.com. In order to update album art and artist information, I need to send the following 

  # Update the song now playing on a station
    GET http://air.radiotime.com/Playing.ashx?partnerId=<id>&partnerKey=<key>&id=<stationid>&title=Bad+Romance&artist=Lady+Gaga

The only way I can think to do this would be by setting up a PHP/JS page that updates the &title and &artist part of the URL and sends it off if there is a change. But I'd have to execute it every second, or at least every few seconds, using cron.

Are there any other more efficient ways this could be done?

Thank you for your help.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 498

Answers (1)

user636044
user636044

Reputation:

None of the code in this answer was tested. Use at your own risk.

Since you do not control the third-party API and the API is not capable of pushing information to you when it's available (an ideal situation), your only option is to poll the API at some interval to look for changes and to make updates as necessary. (Be sure the API provider is okay with such an approach as it might violate terms of use designed to prevent system abuse.)

You need some sort of long-running process that will execute at a given interval.

You mentioned cron calling a PHP script which is one option (here cron is the long-running process). Cron is very stable and would be a good choice. I believe though that cron has a minimum interval of 1 minute. I'm sure there are similar tools out there, but those might require you to have full control over your server.

You could also make a PHP script the long-running process with something like this:

while(true){
    doUpdates();  # Call the API, make updates, etc
    sleep(5);     # Wait 5 seconds
}

If you do go down the PHP route, error handling of some sort will be a must:

while(true){
    try{
        doUpdates();
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        # manage the error
    }
    sleep(5);
}

Personal Advice

Using PHP as a daemon is possible but it is not as well tested as the typical use of PHP. If this task was given to me, I'd write a server/application in JavaScript using Node.js. I would prefer Node because it is designed to work as a long running process and intervals/events are a key part of JavaScript and I would be more confident in that working well than PHP for this specific task.

Upvotes: 1

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