Question

I’m running this loop on the server side:

while (true) {
    $changed = $this->sockets;
    socket_select($changed, $write = NULL, $except = NULL, NULL);
    foreach($changed AS $socket) {
            if($socket == $this->master) {
                    $client = socket_accept($this->master);
                    if($client < 0) {
                            echo "socket_accept failed";
                            continue;
                    } else {
                            $this->connect($client);
                    }
            } else {
                    $bytes = @socket_recv($socket, $buffer, 2048, 0);
                    if($bytes == 0) {
                            $this->close($socket);
                    } else {
                            $user = $this->get_user_by_socket($socket);
                            if(!$user->handshake) {
                                    $this->do_handshake($user, $buffer);
                            } else {
                                    $this->process($user, $buffer);
                            }
                    }
            }
    }
}

Basically it waits for anything to be changed within the sockets before performing any actions that can be sent to all clients, or just individual clients. What I would like to do is be able to push data to clients after a period of inactivity…say like a countdown timer in a game. So after 5 seconds if there has been no action from a user, automatically send an action for that user. How would I go about that? I’ve tried to have a last_update with the time() stored in it then check the math, but anything that I put within the while(true) loop only gets run when there is a change in the sockets, which comes from the user end…

I guess I’m just super lost. 🙂

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to set a non-blocking flag for your socket_recv() function. Otherwise it will just sit on this line until a minimum number of bytes have been received.

Perhaps

$bytes = socket_recv($socket, $buffer, 2048, MSG_DONTWAIT);