Running multiple functions concurrently

Pig

I am building a program that will crawl a website, and look for specified anomolies. The website is highly flexible and will appear different depending on the profile being used. The program will need to check the website using several profiles.

I would like to have the program run each profile check concurrently to speed up the process (the bottleneck will likely be the speed of the pages being served). So rather than check profile A, then profile B, then profile C, it checks A, B and C all at the same time. I thought about launching a separate script for each, and passing parameters which profile it should be checking, but I need all the errors that are reported to be tied together and not reported seperately.

Any suggestions on a graceful way of doing this, or is that just the nature of the beast?

TIA!

Azala

3 Cron jobs, each piece of code write errors to the same database, maybe a 4th cron job running at xx time after the 3 others that will create a report based on the reported errors in the database.

As far as I know each line in the script is executed after the other, so there is no way to launch 3 "jobs" at the same time from 1 script, the first would have to finish before the second started and so on.

Pig

Yeah, the sequential processing is the main issue. I would like to avoid dumping the results and then picking them up when everything is done, but I don't know if there is anyway around that. Thanks for the suggestion.

Weedpacket

Windows is a serious pain to spawn child processes in - it's not well-suited to the concept; if you ignore that OS, therefore, and focus on Un*x systems, you can (after reconfiguring PHP to include the extension), use [man]pcntl_fork[/man]. The forked process is a duplicate of the original including almost all its state (the example code on that page shows how to tell which is the parent), so it would be interesting to see how to get it to fork three processes that all do different things.

superwormy

You might also look at the PEAR package: http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_Fork