Forking a part of the php code - php

Question

In my code I am sending a request to another page using curl_exec. I do not need the curl_exec result for the rest of the script and I do not want it to block until the curl_exec request is done and has received a response.
Any ideas if I can fork of a specific part of the script?
Or any other design ideas...?

Answer 1

Here's a few ideas:
Use curl_multi, and close curl at the very end of the request. You could even do this 'after shutdown'
Use worker scripts, with for example 'gearman'
Or:
You could open sockets manually, and handle stuff asynchronously using the libevent extension

Answer 2

Do you need the responses of the cURL requests?
First, the pcntl functions you would need to fork are generally a bad idea.
One method would be to place the cURL code in a separate script and exec() that script so it runs in the background.
$command = "php ..../wherever/your/kohana/cli/controller/is.php";
exec('php /path/to/curlscript.php > /dev/null &');
Outputting to /dev/null & allows the script to continue running in the background.
Alternatively, and probably a better solution, would be to implement a queue system such as Gearman or RabbitMQ.

Answer 3

Take a look at curl-multi-exec, might be what you need:

Answer 4

PHP doesn't support forks and threads, but you can get rid of the response by setting a response timeout:
function curl_post_async($url, $params)
{
foreach ($params as $key => &$val) {
if (is_array($val)) $val = implode(',', $val);
$post_params[] = $key.'='.urlencode($val);
}
$post_string = implode('&', $post_params);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_string);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'curl');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
Taken from: How to post an asynchronous HTTP request in PHP
As the CURL documentation, you can use CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS since PHP 5.2.3 and CURL 7.16.2.