Question

Suppose there are two scripts Requester.php and Provider.php, and Requester requires processing from Provider and makes an http request to it (Provider.php?data=’data’). In this situation, Provider quickly finds the answer, but to maintain the system must perform various updates throughout the database. Is there a way to immediately return the value to Requester, and then continue processing in Provider.

Psuedo Code

Provider.php  {    $answer = getAnswer($_GET['data']);    echo $answer;    //SIGNAL TO REQUESTER THAT WE ARE FINISHED    processDBUpdates();    return; } 

Answer 1

You basically want to signal the end of 1 process (return to the original Requester.php) and spawn a new process (finish Provider.php). There is probably a more elegant way to pull this off, but I’ve managed this a couple different ways. All of them basically result in exec-ing a command in order to shell off the second process.

adding the following > /dev/null 2>&1 & to the end of your command will allow it to run in the background without inhibiting the actual execution of your current script

Something like the following may work for you:

exec('wget -O - \'$url\' > /dev/null 2>&1 &');  

— though you could do it as a command line PHP process as well.

You could also save the information that needs to be processed and handle the remaining processing on a cron job that re-creates the same sort of functionality without the need to exec.