使用php循环通过多个FTP连接的建议

Question

I am looking for some advice on how other developers would go about completing this same task. Essentially what I am attempting to do is loop through rows within my database to connect to multiple FTP accounts, preg_match, then output the files separate from each other. Here is an example of the workflow:

pull connection 1
login to FTP
check preg_match against all files listed
list matching files
disconnect
...
pull connection 2
login to FTP
check preg_match against all files listed
list matching files
disconnect
...
repeat

The end result will be me creating a table with the results separate from each other.

Answer 1

I think the largest challenge here will be the latency time. I would look for a solution which didn't attempt to do this all in real-time, while someone was waiting for a web page to load or some other output. If possible I would build some API on the remote servers so I didn't have to do raw FTP requests, but could instead query for the matched results as determined on the remote server. If needed, though, I would use PHP's cURL facility to make the connection to each external server independently, in it's own cron-driven script, with all output stored into a central database. Then the final output needed could be queried against the local database independently of fetching/matching.

Answer 2

If there are many FTP connections to make and if performance is a consideration then you will want to make the connections in parallel rather than serially. To do this, spawn sub-processes that do the work, saving their results into a DB while the parent process waits for enough results to be created before getting the results from the DB and outputting them.