PHP: Can I do anything else while reading a socket?

Question

I have a PHP script that reads a socket open to an IRC server.

However I have some other things I would like to run independently, not just when a message is received from the IRC server. Is there any way to do this with PHP?

For example, this doesn't work

while (true) {
    while ($raw = fgets($socket)) {
        // message received
    }
    do_something_every_loop();
}

I could run another PHP script to do these checks, but could I then connect to IRC with the same account?

Answer 1

If that's CLI script you could try multithreading

http://php.net/manual/en/intro.pthreads.php