Question

Does php have the ability to do this:

Let’s say you have an observatory. To start a photographing run, you would load the page and click a button. This would make the server start another script, which would run in the background. The page would then update every second (or whatever) with the current information about the observatory.

What I am wondering is if PHP can run in the background like that, and still provide updated status information on page refresh.

Answer 1

I guess you are looking for a daemon written in PHP. There’s lot info on the net under that term, e.g. re-cycledair.com/php-dark-arts-daemonizing-a-process