Question

I’ve been trying to complete a script that sends the proper notification to a users browser to close the connection, but allows the server to keep processing a request. My code is based on what I’ve seen on:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.connection-handling.php#71172

and

close a connection early

ob_start();
echo ('Text the user will see');
$size = ob_get_length();
ignore_user_abort(); // optional
header('Content-Encoding: none');
header("Content-Length: $size");
header("Connection: close");
// flush all output
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();

sleep(5);
//just a test to see if the script continues to run 
file_put_contents("trash/".date('dmY-H_i_s_1').".txt", "Some text.");
file_put_contents("trash/".date('dmY-H_i_s_2').".txt", "Some text.");
file_put_contents("trash/".date('dmY-H_i_s_3').".txt", "Some text.");

When I go to run the script, sometimes it will create the first file but not write the text to it. Sometimes it doesn’t create any files. If I run the script with the return early code commented out, all three files are created just fine. Zlib compression is turned off. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The right way to do this is to use php in fastcgi mode and then you can use the function
fastcgi_finish_request();
it will do exactly what you need – it will close the connection to the browser but the rest of the script will continue to run to the end.

http://php-fpm.org/wiki/Features

It’s much better than relying on output buffering.