Question

I have a php script that sends SMS, the problem is that it takes some time before every SMS is sent. In my site the page will wait until this script has finished running. How can I give user a message that SMS will be sent and resume the site’s normal operation.

Answer 1

The only issue here is that the browser thinks it is are waiting for more output from the script when there will be none. You could offload to a seperate process, or use an asynchronous web call, or you could simply…..

<?php
register_shutdown_function('when_alls_done');
.... // render page
exit;

function when_alls_done()
{
    if ($_REQUEST['send_to_phone']) {
       send_sms($_REQUEST['send_to_phone'], $_REQUEST['message']);
    }
}

The webserver should flush the request at the ‘exit’ and let the browser know that the response is complete (an explicit flush in the PHP code prior to that will either not flush the webserver buffer or it will result in the output being chunk encoded with another chunk to come).

C.