Long Waits/Browser Timeouts

[jermainej5]

I'm in a situation where a script takes some input from a form filled out by a user, then fires off a very long process based on the data from the form. This process parses a lot of data stored on the local hard disk, crunches some numbers, and performs som other quite time-comsuming tasks. Overall, it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to do it's work (and I can't change this...for this project I don't have control over how that process works). This, of course, would be long enough for most browsers to time out. What I would like to do is after the user clicks the "submit" button on the form, he would see a message to the effect of "Processing...". Or if I got real fancy, "Processing...10% complete". When the very long process finally finishes, the page would change to display the results. I'm relatively new to PHP (I come from Perl) and was wondering what the best way to accomplish this is. Any suggestions?

[tekky]

search for set_time_out() on www.php.net

granted this only answers part of your question... its a start 🙂

[maybl8r03]

set_time_out() will work for most cases unless your script execution time exceed's the webserver's CGI Time-out setting. Example in IIS is that php will usually timeout after 30 seconds default, and if it doesn't the second trap will be the script timeout in IIS which defaults to 90 seconds.

Try not to change your web-server timeout settings (it's there to make sure the zombie CGI's get cleaned out) but if you really have to look into the Script Timeout in IIS or the TimeOut directive in Apache.