Question

Is there a way to timeout a function? I have 10 minutes to perform a job. The job includes a for loop, here is an example:

<?php
foreach($arr as $key => $value){
   some_function($key, $value); //This function does SSH and SFTP stuff
}
?>

$arr has 15 elements and some_function() sometimes may take more than 1 minutes. In fact once it got hanged for 5 minutes.

Is there a way I can timeout the function call and move on with next element in $arr?

Thank you!!

Answer 1

It depends on your implementation. 99% of the functions in PHP are blocking. Meaning processing will not continue until the current function has completed. However, if the function contains a loop you can add in your own code to interrupt the loop after a certain condition has been met.

Something like this:

foreach ($array as $value) {
  perform_task($value);
}

function perform_task($value) {
  $start_time = time();

  while(true) {
    if ((time() - $start_time) > 300) {
      return false; // timeout, function took longer than 300 seconds
    }
    // Other processing
  }
}

Another example where interrupting the processing IS NOT possible:

foreach ($array as $value) {
  perform_task($value);
}

function perform_task($value) {
    // preg_replace is a blocking function
    // There's no way to break out of it after a certain amount of time.
    return preg_replace('/pattern/', 'replace', $value);
}