Forcing a file to be executed

[gmdavis]

I am having issues with page loading speed becasue a php function I use needs time to gather information from several remote files. The remote information only needs to be check daily at minimum (currently it is checked every time someone loads the page).

My hope is that I can somehow cause this information to be extracted from the remote files (and written to a php-generated html file) before the html page is requested.

Is there a way to have a timed event that will open a php file on my server (which will execute and overwrite an html file)?

Or, is there a way to send a call for the file to open (and run) after the html page is loaded (without affecting the html file speed)?

FYI: I use include() currently so that is not the answer because the page won't finish loading until the included file is finished being run. Is eval() a possible slution. I'll admit I'm new to PHP and don't really fully understand some of the documentation yet.

[bastien]

to schedule jobs for unix and use nt scheduler for Windows...

another option is to make the first user to your site wait while the data is being retreived and the html page created and then all the other users won't need to wait as the page is already complete...

it is not an elegant solution, but it will work...

[ShawnD]

why not just run the link in a page using includes as frames? that way, people won't view it unless they go out of their way to click the link 😉

setup a thing like this

$page = $_GET['page'];
if(page=="whatever"){
include("whatever.php");
}

then as a link to whatever, it looks like this:
index.php?page=whatever

🙂

to see what i mean sort of, click here
clicking on the links on the left makes it load the include specified by the URL 😉