Reputation: 329

PHP thread pool?

I have scheduled a CRON job to run every 4 hours which needs to gather user accounts information. Now I want to speed things up and to split the work between several processes and to use one process to update the MySQL DB with the retrieved data from other processes.

In JAVA I know that there is a thread pool which I can dedicate some threads to accomplish some work.

how do I do it in PHP?

Any advice is welcome.

Thank

Upvotes: 7

Answers (7)

pinaki

Reputation: 5473

Check these posts - * http://www.alternateinterior.com/2007/05/multi-threading-strategies-in-php.html * http://www.electrictoolbox.com/article/php/process-forking/

Basically you need to share data between processes and as I see, you will probably need to write to some file first. Fetch using the main process (make it a ajax-polling type process) and write to DB.

Upvotes: 0

OSP

Reputation: 1487

Nice process pool of Arbow on github With modification mentioned here

Upvotes: 0

Roberto Aloi

Reputation: 30985

PHP is probably not the most suitable language for multi-threading.

You might want to have a look to different solutions. For example, Thrift allows you to have a PHP front-end talking with a Java back-end, where you could easily implement your desired behaviour.

If you still want to do this in PHP, you might want to have a look to:

http://www.php.net/pcntl

http://www.electrictoolbox.com/article/php/process-forking/

Upvotes: 7

Lior Ben-Kereth

Reputation: 131

You can also check out this article that shows how to simulate threading, including a thread pool manager using async HTTP calls, and a web server:

http://w-shadow.com/blog/2008/05/24/improved-thread-simulation-class-for-php/

Upvotes: 1

symcbean

Reputation: 48357

As others have said, forking processes is easier than spawning threads with PHP. But why do you think that having a single dedicated thread to write the results back to the database is a good idea? Although this is slightly simpler to do with threads rather than processes, its still a complex overhead which doesn't seem to add any value to the overall objective.

Indeed, its a lot simpler to start up several instances of the script (with some parameter to partition the data) from cron rather than initiating a fork from within the PHP code - and not bother with any bottleneck for recording the data back into the database.

Upvotes: 1

Andreas

Reputation: 5335

PHP and Threads (these 2 words) cannot go together in the same sentence. PHP does not offer thread support. You can try the pcntl forking mechanisms or asynchronous processing which in your case is not helpfull.

You can use a workload distribution mechanism that might be what you want by having a look at Gearman (suggest you google it).

As described by others "it is a distributed forking machine" that can offer the workload distribution that you are looking for in order "to speed things up".

regards,

Upvotes: 3

Messa

Reputation: 25181

You can fork new processes in PHP too: pcntl_fork()

BTW. is that script running longer than 4 hours? Otherwise I see no reason why complicate it with thread or process management.

Upvotes: 0

PHP thread pool?

Answers (7)

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