forking process with http redirect

Anon

I have an application that sends out mass mails, and I don't want the user to have to sit there for 4 hours waiting for the sending to finish. I tried flush() to keep the browser from timing out, but i was thinking that i could do somthing like this:

header ("Location: http://www.site.com/mailinglist/sending.php");
flush();

//loop through mail now.

This doesnt seem to redirect until all the mail has been sent, even though i try to flush the header to the browser.

What i want this to do is send the user's browser somewhere else, and continue processing. Is that possible?

cordex

So you're the bastage to blame for all that junk mail???

grin

-Ben

mithril

You may have better luck forking off the actual send script and run it as a command line process. To do this you'll need to have a CGI copy of the interpreter installed on your server.

$pfp = popen("/path/to/php-cgi/interpreter -q /path/to/mail-sender.php $arg1 $arg2 $arg3 etc", "r");

The passed arguements ($arg1 $arg2 $arg3) sill be available in either the argc or argv array (forget which at the moment).

Since you've forked a pipe to execute the mail sending, the rest of your page should continue loading. The only possible drawback here is that it may leave some orphaned PHP processes lying around. Even though in my experince the interpreter has always killed itself at the end of the script execution, I also haven't tried doing something like this. You also can't retrive output from the mailing script, your browser would hace to wait for it and that would obviously undermine the whole excerise. HTH.

-geoff

Anon

I had a similar problem.

Direct forking is not possible, so I did a workaround to do this.

You write a script for the normal User-Output. Within this code you initiate another request to your webserver, which starts the worker-script. After that the worker script runs in Background.

Works fine for me.

Code looks like this:

$service_port = getservbyname ('www', 'tcp');
$address = $GLOBALS["SERVER_ADDR"];
$socket = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
if ($socket < 0) {
echo "socket() failed: reason: " .
strerror ($socket) . "\n";
}

/ Establish connection /
$result = connect ($socket, $address, $service_port);

if ($result < 0) {
echo "connect() failed.\nReason: ($result) " . strerror($result) . "\n";
}

/ Send Request to server /
$in = "GET /your_directory/workerscript.php4?yourArgs=blabla\r\n\r\n";
write ($socket, $in, strlen ($in));
/ Close Socket /

close($socket);

Be careful with execution time limits in your worker script. There are two limits: execution time limit from php and request time limit apache (if you use it).

You have to enable ignore_user_abort(true) in your worker-script, because it would die immediately after your first script closes the connection.

Stephan