How do I close a connection early?

Question

I\'m attempting to do an AJAX call (via JQuery) that will initiate a fairly long process. I\'d like the script to simply send a response indicating that the process has star

Answer 1

Here's a modification to Timbo's code that works with gzip compression.

// buffer all upcoming output
if(!ob_start("ob_gzhandler")){
    define('NO_GZ_BUFFER', true);
    ob_start();
}
echo "We'll email you as soon as this is done.";

//Flush here before getting content length if ob_gzhandler was used.
if(!defined('NO_GZ_BUFFER')){
    ob_end_flush();
}

// get the size of the output
$size = ob_get_length();

// send headers to tell the browser to close the connection
header("Content-Length: $size");
header('Connection: close');

// flush all output
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();

// if you're using sessions, this prevents subsequent requests
// from hanging while the background process executes
if (session_id()) session_write_close();

/******** background process starts here ********/