PHP长期任务

Question

Well, I want to be able to have PHP threads running in the background which are writing their result to a SQL database, which I use to display the information to end-user.

My question is: How do I start aa new thread which can take some hours to finish from a PHP script? I'm not quite sure about using cron jobs, because (as far as I know) I can only execute those based on the time and not based on when a new thread is required.

Answer 1

There is a extension called pthreads that supports creating multiple threads. See:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pthreads.php

Although you should remember that depending on how you're running PHP you may find that spawning threads is not the most reliable way of completing a background task.