Question

The one below is a common way how a master and a child script do data sharing:

cron job — schedule –> master script

HTTP request — trigger –> child script

master script –> [database] <– child script

But is it possible to them to share the data using any of these below, instead of the database?

• global variable
• system storage
• session storage
• memcache / apc / any other thing like these

Answer 1

1. global variable – no
2. system storage (from comments: this is command line) – no because that would involve one launching the other, and still be one-way…
3. session storage – yes, using named session, but this will resort to files by default (can be configured to use shm and then in-memory…)
4. memcached – yes
5. apc – yes, but will require explicit configuration to enable in cli sapi
6. files – yes. And to speed things up, you can use ramfs to store files in an in-memory filesystem.
7. sockets – yes (make one of the a listener and connect from another)
8. database – yes (why not, actually?)

In case i left anything out, you can search for php interprocess communication