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
You could try to do multithreading.
you could whip up a script that makes a system call ( using shell_exec ) that calls the php binary with the script to do your work as the parameter. But I don't think that is the most secure way. Maybe you can thighten stuff up by chrooting the php process and other stuff
Alternatively, there's a class at phpclasses that do that http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/3953.html. But I don't know the specifics of the implementation