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Asked: 2026-06-01T17:31:42+00:00

I’m a moderate to good PHP programer and have experience with terminal/shell scripts but

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I’m a moderate to good PHP programer and have experience with terminal/shell scripts but what I’m trying to wrap my head around is the logics behind background processes and is most certainly not Cron or Cron Jobs but a continual flow of data.

I recently talked to someone who made a little web app that worked with the twitter streaming API and Phirehose to gather tweets and save them to a DB. Now sounds simple but all this happens in the background as a process. What I’m ineptly used to is:

call process -> process finishes -> handle data from process.

What is so different about this is that it happens all the time non stop. I remember there was also so talk of socket connection as well.

So my questions are:

  1. When executing a background process, is it a continual loop of specific function? That’s all that I can logically conclude, or does it some how “stay open” and happen?
  2. What does a socket connection do in this equation?
  3. Is the any form of latency inherit from running this type of process?

I know this is not a “code specific” type of question but I can’t find much information regarding this type of question.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1. When executing a background process, is it a continual loop of specific function? That’s all that I can logically conclude, or does it some how “stay open” and happen?

    No, there is not requirement of such a continual loop. A background process can just be invoked, run and finish as well. It than does not run any longer like any other process as well. Maybe not useful for a background process, but possible.

    2. What does a socket connection do in this equation?

    Sockets are sometimes used to allow communication between different processes, also worded IPC – Inter Process Communication.

    3. Is the any form of latency inherit from running this type of process?

    Yes, every form of indirection comes with a price. Additionally, if you run multiple processes in parallel, there is also some overhead for the computer system to manage these multiple processes (which it does anyway nowadays, but just saying, if there were only one process, there would be nothing to manage).

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