The architecture where "multiple processes communicate with a shared
database" gets less credit than it deserves. In your case I think there's
no reason you can't write your batch scripts in PHP: pretty commonly I
write command line scripts that run as cron jobs... In that situation,
you can use
http://php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php
to fork the same way you would in Perl. I tend to do long-running tasks
as cron jobs that are scheduled to run for a certain time (maybe 4 minutes)
and that get respawned every so often (say 5 minutes.) You do need some
logic to prevent them from getting stacked up when things go wrong, but
this works pretty well.
I think this is the direction I want to head. Thanks!!
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