Function Taking Too Long... Solutions?

sois

Hello, I run a Tecmo Super Bowl (nintendo football) league online and one of the features of my league is a "sig image" file which has the player's stats, record, latest game... misc information. The file is one they can use as a signature on other message boards or on their website.

I coded this into my rankings page because that is a page often viewed; thus generating more up to date signatures. What this does is make the rankings page load VERY slowly because my league is growing.

Is there any way to have this function going in the background or being the very last thing to load? I would like the text and all of that good stuff to pop up first and then, the sig_create function can run its course.

Any ideas?

I don't mean to spam, but if you want to see the page that is having the problem, it is here:
www.tpc.sois.com/soispoll.php

all of my other pages load pretty quickly.

Thanks!

bpat1434

You could try output buffering (search the manual)

Or even take a look in the user notes for "run in background" and you'll see a few options:
PHP Manual: exec

Or, not return all 101 people at once, maybe only do 10 or 15....

~Brett

sois

Would it be smart to run it once a day? What would be the best way to do that?

bpat1434

Up to you. Depends on how often you want to update it. I'd create a static page, and just have PHP generate it once every 6 hours (4 times per day). Then, just set up a cron to run that PHP script every 6 hours

~Brett

sois

Hmmm, this "cron" seems interesting. I think that is what I need, man I will love crons if this works!

sois

How does this work exactly? I made the file, I went to the cpanel and tried to set it up and it says :

http://www.tpc.sois.com/cronstuff.php: not found

The file is there, I know it is.

madwormer2

Remove the : at the end of the URL 😉

sois

God I Love Crons, Thanks All!!