Question

I’m trying to make a sort of PHP bot. The idea is to have to php files, named a.php and b.php. a.php does something, then sleeps 30 seconds, calls b.php, b.php ends the Http request, does some processing, and then calls a.php, which ends the Http request, and so on.

Only problem now is how to end the Http reqest, made using cURL. Ive tried this code below:

<?php
ob_end_clean();
header("Connection: close");
ignore_user_abort(); // optional
ob_start();
echo ('Text the user will see');
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
ob_end_flush();     // Will not work
flush();            // Unless both are called !

// At this point, the browser has closed connection to the web server

// Do processing here
echo('Text user will never see');

Slight problem is that it doesn’t work, and I actually see “Text user will never see”. I’ve tried cron jobs and such, but host doesn’t allow it. I can’t sent the script timeout limit either. So my only option is to create repeating php scripts. So how would I send the Http request?

Answer 1

Based on the new understanding of your problem. You are creating a system that checks a remote URL every 30 seconds to monitor a fragment of content. For this I recommend a CRON which can either be server based: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron or web based if your host does not permit it: http://www.webbasedcron.com/ (example).