Parallel processing in PHP - How do you do it?

Question

I am currently trying to implement a job queue in php. The queue will then be processed as a batch job and should be able to process some jobs in parallel.

I already

Answer 1

Here's a summary of a few options for parallel processing in PHP.

AMP

Checkout Amp - Asynchronous concurrency made simple - this looks to be the most mature PHP library I've seen for parallel processing.

Peec's Process Class

This class was posted in the comments of PHP's exec() function and provides a real simple starting point for forking new processes and keeping track of them.

Example:

// You may use status(), start(), and stop(). notice that start() method gets called automatically one time.
$process = new Process('ls -al');

// or if you got the pid, however here only the status() metod will work.
$process = new Process();
$process.setPid(my_pid);

// Then you can start/stop/check status of the job.
$process.stop();
$process.start();
if ($process.status()) {
    echo "The process is currently running";
} else {
    echo "The process is not running.";
}

Other Options Compared

There's also a great article Async processing or multitasking in PHP that explains the pros and cons of various approaches:

• pthreads extension (see also this SitePoint article)
• Amp\Thread Library
• hack's async (requires running Facebook's HHVM)
• pcntl_fork
• popen
• fopen/curl/fsockopen

Doorman

Then, there's also this simple tutorial which was wrapped up into a little library called Doorman.

Hope these links provide a useful starting point for more research.