Is making asynchronous HTTP requests possible with PHP?

Question

I have a PHP script that needs to download several files from a remote server. At the moment I just have a loop downloading and processing the files with cURL, which means t

Answer 1

For PHP5.5+, mpyw/co is the ultimate solution. It works as if it is tj/co in JavaScript.

Example

Assume that you want to download specified multiple GitHub users' avatars. The following steps are required for each user.

1. Get content of http://github.com/mpyw (GET HTML)
2. Find and request it (GET IMAGE)

---: Waiting my response
...: Waiting other response in parallel flows

Many famous curl_multi based scripts already provide us the following flows.

        /-----------GET HTML\  /--GET IMAGE.........\
       /                     \/                      \ 
[Start] GET HTML..............----------------GET IMAGE [Finish]
       \                     /\                      /
        \-----GET HTML....../  \-----GET IMAGE....../

However, this is not efficient enough. Do you want to reduce worthless waiting times ...?

        /-----------GET HTML--GET IMAGE\
       /                                \            
[Start] GET HTML----------------GET IMAGE [Finish]
       \                                /
        \-----GET HTML-----GET IMAGE.../

Yes, it's very easy with mpyw/co. For more details, visit the repository page.