PHP can't do things in tandem/parellel?

esksoftware

I have searched the web in vain for an answer to this.

I have a script that grabs HTML from several other websites (like Yahoo.com and others) using GET and POST requests.

The script runs slowly because it must wait for each website to reply before making a request to the next website.

I would like to launch requests to all of the websites at the same time, so that each of websites can process my request at the same time. Then, when I have received replies from all of the websites, my script could finish running.

The php.net documentation talks about Process Control functions but says they cannot be used in a webserver situation. So that is no help.

Can PHP do this? If not, which web server languages can?

Many thanks in advance for any reply!
Erik

Sgarissta

Since PHP does not support threading, it can't really support parallel processing either. AFAIK there aren't any "web scripting" languages with support for threading. But thanks to the wonders of apache you aren't limited to "scripting" languages.

You could create a cgi app, written in C/C++ to accomplish this.

ZibingsCoder

o_O

Very strange...I was just looking into this today for an IRC bot I was making. My situation doesn't really involve a webserver though, just wanted to use PHP as a server-side scripting language to prove someone wrong on something...

Only complaint I have is the lack of examples in the PHP manual. Otherwise, as far as I can see, you may have misinterpreted something, because I can see how it'd work even on a webserver as long as the proper extensions were included at compile-time. It SHOULD allow for very mediocre threading, well, forking is more accurate. Using that, you should be able to somewhat get what you wanted. Then again...maybe I read the manual wrong. 😉

Sgarissta

While forking would allow you to farm off the initial requests, you would not be able to send data back to the calling program.

PHP AFAIK doesn't support bi-directional pipes making any sort of pseudo-threading nearly impossible.

I was working on something at one point that forked processes off, which then wrote their data to a database (or it could work with just a file), which could be read by the calling program whenever it felt like it. It's still not really threading, but it would allow you to have an external program do some processing for you and still have access to the data.

onion2k

Originally posted by esksoftware
Can PHP do this? If not, which web server languages can?

Perl can. So can ASP (through COM).