I've got a PHP script that does some heavy lifting that I'm trying to fire off as a background script using the following code:
exec("script.php > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &");
What happens:
When I run the code above as part of my web app, the script quits after about a minute.
When I run the code as part of my web app without the final ampersand, the job runs fine - but
exec()waits for the script to complete before loading the next page, defeating the purpose as the user stares at an unresponsive page.When I run the shell command
script.php > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &as myself from the console with the final ampersand, the job runs fine.When I run the shell command from the console as web, the job stops running after about a minute.
I've tried piping my output to logfiles: script.php > /home/public/tmp/output.txt 2> /home/public/tmp/errors.txt &. Output looks normal, I don't get any errors. The script just stops working.
The basic rule seems to be: If run as a foreground process as web or as me, it'll complete. If run as a background process as web, it stops working after about a minute.
I'm not running this as a cronjob because my host (NearlyFreeSpeech) can only run cronjobs once an hour, which is more than I want to make users wait for when the job only takes a couple minutes- it might as well fire when users initiate it.
The subscript starts with set_time_limit(60 * 60 * 4); so this shouldn't be a matter of PHP timing out.
does not include shell-execution time. http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php
Try using of the code examples in the comments on that site.