session file appears "locked" - PLEASE NEED HELP!

[sfullman]

Gentlemen,

Made an earlier post that was pretty long and no answers, realized I can isolate the problem so heres a MUCH simpler situation:

Here's page one:

session_start();
for($i=1;$i<=50;$i++){
   set_time_limit(11);
   sleep(10);
   echo 'Pass '.$i.', slept for 10 seconds<br>';

}

Here's page two:

session_start();
echo 'Session successfully started!';

The problem is, I can't call page two while page one is running. And page one is pretty bare bones, agreed? There seems to be a locking issue on the session file. Any way around this?

What makes me think this is:
1. I can still access any other session file on another domain with session_start();
2. I can start a session with a different id (=different file) on that domain.

Please help, I can do some really cool things if this is solved!!!
Thanks,
Samuel

[edited: --------]
I found a workaround to this but it's a hack. Page one:

session_start();
$job=1;
for($i=1;$i<=100;$i++){
	set_time_limit(15);
	sleep(10);
	echo 'Pass '.$i.', slept 10<br>';
	if(file_exists('/tmp/sess_'.$PHPSESSID.'-stop-'.$job)){
		echo 'got file!<br>';
		$stopOrders=trim(implode('',file('/tmp/sess_'.$PHPSESSID.'-stop-'.$job)));
		echo 'contents: '.$stopOrders.'<br>';
		if($stopOrders==1){
			echo 'stop process from outside trigger<br>';
			break;
		}
	}
}

Page two:

//can't start session so we get session id this way
$job=1;
$fp=fopen('/tmp/sess_'.$_COOKIE['PHPSESSID'].'-stop-'.$job,'w');
fwrite($fp,'1');
fclose($fp);