Call a URL without waiting?

[grunff]

Hi all,

We have a script which updates data on a number of sites in response to an event. This is done by calling a URL on each of the sites. The problem is that at busy times, this can take a long time, and cause slow loading.

The URL calls are currently done using

 fopen("http://www.myurl.com", "r");

This can happen up to 40 times in a row, each call to a different URL. It's by no means ideal, but it's what I have to work with right now.

PHP waits for each call to respond, before going to the next one. Is it possible to get it to just move onto the next call without waiting?

TIA

[NogDog]

Within a single PHP script, there's probably not much you can do since it's not a threaded language. You might be able to do something clever with separate scripts which you could exec() as background processes from your PHP script.

Depending on what it is you want to do, though, another option might be to use JavaScript on the client to make AJAX calls to a PHP script(s) to call those URLs, do whatever it is you do with them, then display the results. As an example, see http://www.charles-reace.com/test/ajax/.