I wish to create a background process and I have been told these are usually written in C or something of that sort. I have recently found out PHP can be used to create a da
Cron job? Yes.
Daemon which runs forever? No.
PHP does not have a garbage collector (or at least, last time I checked it did not). Therefore, if you create a circular reference, it NEVER gets cleaned up - at least not until the main script execution finishes. In daemon process this is approximately never.
If they've added a GC in new versions, then yes you can.