Question

I have a script that pulls from an external database and stores the data in a local database. I’m setup on a shared-server environment so I’m not able to let the script run for longer than two minutes, yet it would take around 5-10 minutes to run to completion.

Can I have the script stop its foreach loop after one and a half minutes, so I can redirect to the same script but with a different database offset to pick up where it left?

I can do the last part of that using a GET query string, but I’m unsure how to time it.

Answer 1

The easiest way would be to set a time() at the start of your script and check the difference in your foreach loop.

 $start = time(); // Returns time in seconds

 foreach($bigdata as $row) {
    if(time()-$start > 100) {  // Stop 20 seconds before 120 sec limit
       // Some code for exiting the loop...
       break;
    }
 }