Question

this is more of a fundamental question at how apache/threading works.
in this hypothetical (read: sometimes i suck and write terrible code), i write some code that enters the infinite-recursion phases of it’s life. then, what’s expected, happens. the serve stalls.

even if i close the tab, open up a new one, and hit the site again (locally, of course), it does nothing. even if i hit a different domain i’m hosting through a vhost declaration, nothing. i normally have to wait a number of seconds before apache can begin handling traffic again. most of the time i just get tired and restart the server manually.

can someone explain this process to me? i have the php runtime setting ‘ignore_user_abort’ set to true to allow ajax calls that are initiated to keep running even if they close their browser, but would this being set to false affect it?

any help would be appreciated. didn’t know what to search for.
thanks.

Answer 1

ignore_user_abort() allows your script (and Apache) to ignore a user disconnecting (closing browser/tab, moving away from page, hitting ESC, esc..) and continue processing. This is useful in some cases – for instance in a shopping cart once the user hits “yes, place the order”. You really don’t want an order to die halfway through the process, e.g. order’s in the database, but the charge hasn’t been sent to the payment facility yet. Or vice-versa.

However, while this script is busilly running away in “the background”, it will lock up resources on the server, especially the session file – PHP locks the session file to make sure that multiple parallel requests won’t stomp all over the file, so while your infinite loop is running in the background, you won’t be able to use any session-enabled other part of the site. And if the loop is intensive enough, it could tie up the CPU enough that Apache is unable to handle any other requests on other hosted sites, where the session lock might not apply.

If it is an infinite loop, you’ll have to wait until PHP’s own maximum allowed run time (set_time_limit() and max_execution_time()) kicks in and kills the script. There’s also some server-side limiters, like Apache’s RLimitCPU and TimeOut that can handle situations like this.

Note that except on Windows, PHP doesn’t count “external” time in the set_time_limit. So if your runaway process is doing database stuff, calling external programs via system() and the like, the time spent running those external calls is NOT accounted for in the parent’s time limit.