jQuery ajax async 'true' gets my web-app stuck until the data is returned

Question

I am working on a PHP based web app (that i didn\'t build).

I am running this ajax request:

$.ajax({
    type: \'POST\',
    url: \"/potato/ajax.ph         


        

Answer 1

PHP sessions are a prime candidate for other requests getting “stuck”, because the session file gets write-locked, so as long as one running script instance has the session open, all others have to wait.

Solution to that is to call session_write_close as soon as possible.

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A little extended explanation:

The default storage mechanism for session data is simply the file system. For every active session, PHP simply puts a file into the configured session directory, and writes the contents of $_SESSION to it, so that it can be read back from there on the next request that needs to access it.

Now if several PHP script instances tried to write changed session data to that file “simultaneously”, that would quite obviously have great conflict/error potential.

Therefor PHP puts a write lock on the session file, as soon as one script instance accesses the session - everybody else, other requests (to the same script, or a different one also using the session), will have to wait, until the first script is done with the session, and the write lock gets released again.

Per default, that happens when the script is done running. But if you have longer running scripts, this can easily lead to such “blocking” effects as you are experiencing here. The solution to that is to explicitly tell PHP (via session_write_close), “I’m done with the session here, not gonna write any new/changed data to it from this point on - so feel free to release the lock, so that the next script can start reading the session data.”

The important thing is that you only do this after your script is done manipulating any session data. You can still read from $_SESSION during the rest of the script - but you can not write to it any more. (So anything like $_SESSION['foo'] = 'bar'; would have to fail, after you released the session.)

If the only purpose the session serves at this point (in this specific script) is to check user authentication, then you can close the session directly after that. The rest of the script can then run as long as it wants to, without blocking other scripts from accessing the same session any more.

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This isn’t limited to AJAX requests - those are just one of the places where you usually notice stuff like this first, because otherwise you usually don’t have that many requests using the session running in “parallel”. But if you were to f.e. open a long-running script multiple times in several browser tabs, you would notice the same effect there - in the first tab the script will run and do its business, whereas in the following tabs you should notice that those requests are “hanging” as well, as long as the previous script instance holds the write lock on the session.