Question

I’ve got a web page that allows to start a certain process and then redirects to another page that displays log file of that process. Since execution takes up to 10 minutes, I want log page to autoupdate itself or load data from the file periodically.

Right now I added

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=log.php#bottom" /> 

to html/head but wondering if there may be a better solution. Can someone give any advice on aproaching this problem?

Answer 1

I do it this way:

var current_length = 0;
function update() {
  setTimeout(update, 3000);
  $.post("/update_url", { 'current_length': current_length }, function(data) {
    if (data.current_length != current_length) return; //it's too old answer
    $("#log").html($("#log").html() + data.text);
    current_length += data.text.length;
  }, "json"); 
}
update();

The server must skip several bytes at beginning and send json with current_length and the rest of file.

I prefer using memcached to store process output.