Forking in PHP on Windows

Question

We are running PHP on a Windows server (a source of many problems indeed, but migrating is not an option currently). There are a few points where a user-initiated action wi

Answer 1

You can create a daemon/background process to run the code (e.g. sending emails) and the request would just have to add items to the queue, let the deamon do the heavy lifting.

For example, a file send_emails.bat:

cls
C:\PHP533\php.exe D:\web\server.php
exit

open windows task scheduler, and have the above send_emails.bat run every 30 minutes. Make sure only one instance runs at a time or you might run each task in multiples, or send each email twice. I say 30 minutes in case something breaks temporarily (memory issues, database unavailable, etc), it will re-start every 30 minutes rather than having a never ending process that just stops. The following is a skeleton daemon... not complete or tested I am just typing out an example:

query('select subject, body, to_email FROM email_queue');
    if($result->num_rows == 0)
    {
        sleep(10); // so we are not taxing the database 
    }
    else
    {
        while($row = $result->fetch_assoc())
        {
        // send email
        }
    }
}
exit;
?>

Finally you just need the request to add the item to the queue in a database, and let the daemon handle the heavy lifting.

$db->query('insert into email_queue(to,subject,body) values ('customer@email.com','important email','html body!');