Asynchronous Function Call in PHP

Question

I am working on an a PHP web application and i need to perform some network operations in the request like fetching someone from remote server based on user\'s request.

Answer 1

One way is to use pcntl_fork() in a recursive function.

function networkCall(){
  $data = processGETandPOST();
  $response = makeNetworkCall($data);
  processNetworkResponse($response);
  return true;
}

function runAsync($times){
  $pid = pcntl_fork();
  if ($pid == -1) {
    die('could not fork');
  } else if ($pid) {
    // we are the parent
    $times -= 1;
    if($times>0)
      runAsync($times);
    pcntl_wait($status); //Protect against Zombie children
  } else {
    // we are the child
    networkCall();
    posix_kill(getmypid(), SIGKILL);
  }
}

runAsync(3);

One thing about pcntl_fork() is that when running the script by way of Apache, it doesn't work (it's not supported by Apache). So, one way to resolve that issue is to run the script using the php cli, like: exec('php fork.php',$output); from another file. To do this you'll have two files: one that's loaded by Apache and one that's run with exec() from inside the file loaded by Apache like this:

apacheLoadedFile.php

exec('php fork.php',$output);

fork.php

function networkCall(){
  $data = processGETandPOST();
  $response = makeNetworkCall($data);
  processNetworkResponse($response);
  return true;
}

function runAsync($times){
  $pid = pcntl_fork();
  if ($pid == -1) {
    die('could not fork');
  } else if ($pid) {
    // we are the parent
    $times -= 1;
    if($times>0)
      runAsync($times);
    pcntl_wait($status); //Protect against Zombie children
  } else {
    // we are the child
    networkCall();
    posix_kill(getmypid(), SIGKILL);
  }
}

runAsync(3);