Handling Fatal errors?

Anon

Hey,

I've created a site that polls several imap user's mailboxes to get statistics on the number of pieces of mail contained within each.

The problem I'm running into is that occasionally the max execution time is exceeded when I use imap_headers(). I've already increased the value of max_execution_time value to 120, and cannot go above that limit.

What I'm trying is to build my own error handling function to capture this error, and move on to another page.

I've built a generic funciton that captures the E_ERROR code (using set_error_handler()) but the error is still generated on the line that uses imap_headers, and also on the line where my myErrorHandler is specified.

Is it possible to respond gracefully to an execution time exceeded error?

[deleted]

Nope, the time limit was created to stop a script when it goes out of control (endless loops etc)

It would be more than a little silly to let the script continue after you just decided that it was taking too long.

The only real solution to this is either to increase the timelimit for that script (you can always go higher) or forget about using imap functions an do everything yourself using sockets (but that would mean you have to write the whole imap functionality yourself).

Anon

Oh well, have a suggestion on a starting point for building the imap functionality myself?

vincent wrote:

...forget about using imap functions an do everything yourself using sockets (but that would mean you have to write the whole imap functionality yourself).

[deleted]

It's just another protocol, look for it's RFC, the document that describes the protocol. Use fsockopen to connect to the server. And learn how to drink coffee... lots and lots of coffee...

or: you may want to reconsider what you want to do before you start re-inventing the wheel (it's quite cool to write imap functions yourself, but it is a lot of work) is it worth it? or can you perhaps use a crontab solution, where a script is started every X minutes to check the imap status and writes the output to a file that other scripts can read without having to wait for imap to finish? of perhaps you can use a simple version of imap to do a check to see if the long version will take very long?