PHP每X分钟执行一次操作

Question

I've made a PHP script that gets tweets from twitter and saves them to a file for use (as JSON). Problem is that I only get the tweets once when I execute the script, but I want to get it about every 4-5 minutes.

I've looked into sleep but that just delays the browser and executes the action once. I want to be executed every 4 minutes, not just once after a delay.

I looked into cron aswell but the server that I'm going to run my application on does not allow me to use cron.

TL;DR: Anybody know a good way to execute a php script every X minutes after the first execution?

Answer 1

The best bet for this would be to schedule a task to call your PHP page every x mins rather than trying to keep a thread open. Take a look at a CRON JOB .

The scheduled task doesn't need to be executed from the server if you make the page publically accessible.

Answer 2

您可以设置一个Web监视服务（某些服务是免费的，例如Pingdom）以每隔X分钟向您的页面发出HTTP请求，这可以解决问题。

Answer 3

There are providers that offer nothing but running cron jobs for you. Look into them, they could just call your php script every x minutes.

Answer 4

Everything you do to make this work without cron is a hack.

You could go

while (1) {
  process(...)
  sleep(4*60)
}

But you'll run into problems with PHPs execution time limits.

Maybe it's an option to have your script do the action once, and have it called from a cron-capable host every 4 minutes?

Answer 5

I've managed to solve the question myself. As stated in my question, Javascript and Jquery are also viable solutions. I used a setInterval to perform a $.get on my twitter.php file every X minutes.