Parallelism in php - php

I want to optimize part of my code to improve performance.Since my application make use of commandline tool , i think it would certainly improve performance to execute lines of code in parallel rather than executing code sequentially
<?php
$value = exec("command goes here"); //this takes time
/* Some instructions here that don't depend on $value */
/* Some instructions here that don't depend on $value */
$result = $value*2 ; //this is just a dumb example
?>
I want to execute the codes that don't depend on value at the same time as $value so that the whole script execute faster rather that waiting for exec() to complete

For a quick and dirty way of releasing your php thread from a blocking exec thread, you can simply append the command with a "&" or "& disown". In the example below I also redirected all errors and stdout to /dev/null. (I assume a linux system and just used a simple command that might take some amount of time...)
$command = "mv oldFolder/hugeFile.txt newFolder/hugeFile.txt >> /dev/null 2>&1 &";
$value=exec($command);
If you really need the return value from $command just remove the >> /dev/null 2>&1 bit.

Unfortunately PHP always despond you in parallelism, concurrent programming, ....
And I never know that why PHP doesn't support these important things and WHEN PHP WANT TO SUPPORT THESE.
But maybe you want to use Fork in php (if you know the problems AND Troubles in Fork )
http://php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/22919/how-to-fork-with-php-4-different-approaches

Related

Open Linux terminal command in PHP

I have a server running on Linux that execute commands to 12 nodes (12 computers with Linux running in them). I recently downloaded PHP on the server to create web pages that can execute commands by opening a specific PHP file.
I used exec(), passthru(), shell_​exec(), and system(). system() is the only one that returns a part of my code. I would like PHP to act like open termainal command in linux and I cannot figure out how to do it!
Here is an example of what is happening now (Linux directly vs PHP):
When using linux open terminal command directly:
user#wizard:/home/hyperwall/Desktop> /usr/local/bin/chbg -mt
I get an output:
The following settings will be used:
option = mtsu COLOR = IMAGE = imagehereyouknow!
NODES = LOCAL
and additional code to send it to 12 nodes.
Now with PHP:
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt');
break;
}
Output:
The following settings will be used:
option = mtsu COLOR = IMAGE = imagehereyouknow!
NODES = LOCAL
And stops! Anyone has an explanation of what is happening? And how to fix it? Only system displays part of the code the other functions display nothing!
My First thought is it can be something about std and output error. Some softwares dump some informations on std out and some in std error. When you are not redirecting std error to std out, most of the system calls only returns the stdout part. It sounds thats why you see the whole output in terminal and can't in the system calls.
So try with
/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1
Edit:
Also for a temporary work through, you can try some other things. For example redirect the output to file next to the script and read its contents after executing the command, This way you can use the exec:
exec("usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1 > chbg_out");
//Then start reading chbg_out and see is it work
Edit2
Also it does not make sense why others not working for you.
For example this piece of code written in c, dumps a string in stderr and there is other in stdout.
#include <stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
int main()
{
fputs("\nerr\nrro\nrrr\n",stderr);
fputs("\nou\nuu\nuttt\n",stdout);
return 0;
}
and this php script, tries to run that via exec:
<?php
exec("/tmp/ctest",&$result);
foreach ( $result as $v )
{
echo $v;
}
#output ouuuuttt
?>
See it still dumps out the stdout. But it did not receive the stderr.
Now consider this:
<?php
exec("/tmp/ctest 2>&1",&$result);
foreach ( $result as $v )
{
echo $v;
}
//output: errrrorrrouuuuttt
?>
See, this time we got the whole outputs.
This time the system:
<?php
echo system("/tmp/ctest 2>&1");
//output: err rro rrr ou uu uttt uttt
?>
and so on ...
Maybe your chbg -mt writes additional code to stderr instead of stdout? Try to execute your script inside php like this:
/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt 2>&1
The other responses are good for generic advice. But in this specific case, it appears you are trying to change your background on your desktop. This requires many special considerations because of 'user context':
First, your web server is probably running as a different user, and therefore would not have permissions to change your desktop.
Second, the program probably requires some environmental variables from your user context. For example, X programs need a DISPLAY variable, ssh-agent needs SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK, etc. I don't know much about changing backgrounds, but I'm guessing it involves D-Bus, which probably requires things like DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS, KONSOLE_DBUS_SERVICE, KONSOLE_DBUS_SESSION, and KONSOLE_DBUS_WINDOW. There may be many others. Note that some of these vars change every time you log in, so you can't hard-code them on the PHP side.
For testing, it might be simpler to start your own webserver right from your user session. (i.e. Don't use the system one, it has to run as you. You will need to run it on an alternate port, like 8080). The web server you start manually will have all the 'context' it needs. I'll mention websocketd because it just came out and looks neat.
For "production", you may need to run a daemon in your user context all the time, and have the web server talk to that daemon to 'get stuff done' inside your user context.
PHP's system only returns the last line of execution:
Return Value: Returns the last line of the command output on success, and FALSE on failure.
You will most likely want to use either exec or passthru. exec has an optional parameter to put the output into an array. You could implode the output and use that to echo it.
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
exec('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt', $output);
echo implode('\n', $output); // Could use <br /> if HTML output is desired
break;
}
I think that the result of execution, can changes between users.
First, try to run your PHP script directly into your terminal php yourScript.php
If it runs as expected, go to your Apache service and update it to run with your own credentials
You are trying to change the backgrounds for currently logged in users... While they are using the desktop. Like while I'm typing this message. I minimize my browser and 'ooh my desktop background is different'. Hopefully this is for something important like it turns red when the reactor or overheating.
Anyway to my answer:
Instead of trying to remotely connect and run items as the individual users. Setup each user to run a bash script (in their own account, in their own shell) on a repeating timer. Say every 10 minutes. Have it select the SAME file.. from a network location
/somenetworkshare/backgrounds/images/current.png
Then you can update ALL nodes (1 to a million) just by changing the image itself in /somenetworkshare/backgrounds/images/current.png
I wrote something a while ago that does just this -- you can run a command interpreter (/bin/sh), send it commands, read back responses, send more commands, etc. It uses proc_open() to open a child process and talk to it.
It's at http://github.com/andrasq/quicklib, Quick/Proc/Process.php
Using it would look something like (easier if you have a flexible autoloader; I wrote one of those too in Quicklib):
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Exception.php';
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Exists.php';
include 'lib/Quick/Proc/Process.php';
$proc = new Quick_Proc_Process("/bin/sh");
$proc->putInput("pwd\n");
$lines = $proc->getOutputLines($nlines = 10, $timeoutSec = 0.2);
echo $lines[0];
$proc->putInput("date\n");
$lines = $proc->getOutputLines(1, 0.2);
echo $lines[0];
Outputs
/home/andras/quicklib
Sat Feb 21 01:50:39 EST 2015
The unit of communication between php and the process is newline terminated lines. All commands must be newline terminated, and all responses are retrieved in units of lines. Don't forget the newlines, they're hard to identify afterward.
I am working on a project that uses Terminal A on machine A to output to Terminal B on Machine B, both using linux for now. I didnt see it mentioned, but perhaps you can use redirection, something like this in your webserver:
switch($_REQUEST['do'])
{ case 'test':
#process ID on the target (12345, 12346 etc)
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt > /proc/<processID>/fd/1');
#OR
#device file on the target (pts/0,tty0, etc)
echo system('/usr/local/bin/chbg -mt > /dev/<TTY-TYPE>/<TTYNUM>');
break;
}
Definitely the permissions need to be set correctly for this to work. The command "mesg y" in a terminal may also assist...Hope that helps.

Run function in a separate process to avoid segfault

I have a big function, that I have to call a 50-100 times. Previously I used bash script like that:
#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..50}
do
RET=0
until [ ${RET} -eq 1 ]; do
php /scripts/cli.php $i
RET=$?
done
done
But i`m not good in bash scripting while I need to enchance logicwith returned values, so I tried to implement this in pure php with a function like that:
<?
require_once('cli.php');
for($cnt=1; $cnt<=50; $cnt++){
$cli = cli($cnt);
}
?>
But this approach results in segmentation fault after 10-15 cycles. Is it possible to run function in a separate process loke it was in bash script and clean resources to avoid memory leak?
Yes, you could look into proc_open if you need access to the child processes stdin/stdout/stderr or you could use the simpler functions: exec() or passthru().
That said.. PHP should not segfault, there must be some sort of buggy extension you're using. I'd focus more on fixing that than creating workarounds.

advance process control in PHP

I need to build a system that a user will send file to the server
then php will run a command-line tool using system() ( example tool.exe userfile )
i need a way to see the pid of the process to know the user that have start the tool
and a way to know when the tool have stop .
Is this possible on a Windows vista Machine , I can't move to a Linux Server .
besides that the code must continue run when the user close the browser windows
Rather than trying to obtain the ID of a process and monitor how long it runs, I think that what you want to do is have a "wrapper" process that handles pre/post-processing, such as logging or database manipulation.
The first step to the is to create an asynchronous process, that will run independently of the parent and allow it to be started by a call to a web page.
To do this on Windows, we use WshShell:
$cmdToExecute = "tool.exe \"$userfile\"";
$WshShell = new COM("WScript.Shell");
$result = $WshShell->Run($cmdToExecute, 0, FALSE);
...and (for completeness) if we want to do it on *nix, we append > /dev/null 2>&1 & to the command:
$cmdToExecute = "/usr/bin/tool \"$userfile\"";
exec("$cmdToExecute > /dev/null 2>&1 &");
So, now you know how to start an external process that will not block your script, and will continue execution after your script has finished. But this doesn't complete the picture - because you want to track the start and end times of the external process. This is quite simple - we just wrap it in a little PHP script, which we shall call...
wrapper.php
<?php
// Fetch the arguments we need to pass on to the external tool
$userfile = $argv[1];
// Do any necessary pre-processing of the file here
$startTime = microtime(TRUE);
// Execute the external program
exec("C:/path/to/tool.exe \"$userfile\"");
// By the time we get here, the external tool has finished - because
// we know that a standard call to exec() will block until the called
// process finishes
$endTime = microtime(TRUE);
// Log the times etc and do any post processing here
So instead of executing the tool directly, we make our command in the main script:
$cmdToExecute = "php wrapper.php \"$userfile\"";
...and we should have a finely controllable solution for what you want to do.
N.B. Don't forget to escapeshellarg() where necessary!

shell output to web

I need a way to display a linux shell output on a web page. I know there are many webshells but none of them let me display a time changing output (with commands like: top, watch... ), i need a shell based network analyzer so i couldn't start and stop it each time because it need's to run continuously.
Is there any simple way to do this? I don't need any interaction with the shell, just the output of a given command.
thank in advance
Lopoc
In PHP you can use exec(): http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.exec.php
$last = exec('ls', $o, $r);
$o will hold the output and $r will hold the return code and $last will hold the last line of output. In general, You'll typically use it like:
$last = exec('ls', $o, $r);
if ($r != 0)
{
print 'Error running command';
exit($r);
}
else
print implode("\n", $o);
top is an interactive program, the command will continue forever and PHP/exec() will continue waiting for it to finish. You can use top -b -n1 for "batch mode". See top(1) for more information about top's arguments.
If you want a more generic solution which will work for any command, you can use popen() (or proc_open()) run from a xmlrpc script. This is a much more complicated setup though, and required some knowledge about UNIX process control. Doing this correctly is far from trivial...
PS: top's arguments vary from OS to OS. On Linux, you use top -b -n 1, on FreeBSD it's top -b 999 (Where 999 is the number of lines to display). Not sure if this matters for you, but it's good to keep in the back of your head.
Depending on the program you launch, there should be switches like
$ top -n1
That will give you the output you're looking for in form of a snapshot.
Just make the outputting php script refresh itself after the number of seconds you need.
A popular way to do so that works in most browsers is to add a so called Meta Refresh:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5">
Example: Refresh the actual page after five seconds.
If you don't want to learn another language you may want to look into the general CGI module which already supports
A quick google search yields javassh.org. I'm sure there are others.
I found a website that may be helpful in your situation - https://eggshell.pjy.us . The output of your command can be included as an iframe on your page

MySQL commands (not SQL statements) from PHP

Is it possible to, from within a PHP script, execute the same commands you could with the MySQL client?
I know I could theoretically call 'system' to invoke the mysql client installed on the system, but I am not sure how to avoid interactivity (I don't want a REPL/shell, I just want to fire a command). Is there a way to execute commands via the mysql client without going into the shell? In either case this approach seems a bit sketchy.
To clarify, when I say command I am referring to the follow: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-commands.html
while ($obj = mysql_fetch_object($res)) {
$file = $path.$obj->base.".sql";
$cmd = "rm -f ".$file;
exec($cmd);
$cmd = "nice -19 mysqldump -h".$host." -u".$login." -p".$pass." ".$obj->base." > ".$file;
exec($cmd);
$sql = "update save_mysql set last_daily=NOW() where base = '".$obj->base."'";
mysql_query($sql);
}
Are you looking for something like this.
using exec function you can call mysql command`
Sounds hacky. There's Expect to handle "programming interactivity", i.e. a way to wait for the prompt to say particular things. I don't think exec will work, unless you can pass specific switches and run mysql in a non-interactive mode. Depending on what you're trying to do I'd say it best to try and figure out a SQL command you can send through the regular client libs.

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