bruce wrote:
A simple question (or so I thought).

Does php allow an app to create/start a process/application that can
continue to run on its own, after the initiating program/app terminates?

It appears that the spawning/forking functions might work, but the child
apps would be in a zombie status, and couldn't be killed by an external
program.


you keep mentioning this zombie state; make sure that all you're child processes have an exit(); at the end or at the end of the code where they are finished; otherwise you get the xombies!

also here is a very simple model you can follow that invariably works for me:

this will run 10 worker threads:

controller:
<?php
include './your.framework.php';
for($icount=0;$icount<11;$icount++)  {
    include './worker.php';
}
?>

worker:
<?php
$pid=pcntl_fork();
if(!$pid) {
    while(1) {
        if($icount) {
            $offset = $icount * 50;
        } else {
            $offset = 0;
        }
        $db = new mysql_handler( $connection );
        $job_list = new job_list;
        if( $jobs = $job_list->get($offset) ) {
            foreach($jobs as $jdex => $job ) {
                //do something with the job
            }
        } else {
            sleep(10);
        }
    }
} else {
    echo "\ndaemon launcher done id $pid\n";
}
?>

the above code is designed to run indefinately in a constant loop which polls a database for work to do

this is just a very simple example, there are far more complex ways of doing it, keeping a track of how many processes you have, spawning new ones when you need them etc etc, but this i find works v well for me, the key is the $offset; getting jobs from a database and this literally is the offset used, so if you have say 200 emails to get and each script processes 50 at a time, only 4 of your threads are working, bump it up to 10000 and all of them work until the queue drops; the sleep(10) and the spawn process of about 1 per second ensures that you're polling every second so jobs are picked up quickly. it's a lot of functionality for so little code :)


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