I am running through a php background process prob

Question

In my application, the user needs to register through a form, where I have to send three mails and do some other (huge) database checks. It takes a lot of time, is it possible to make the whole task as background process or some other alternates is there?

Answer 1

If your database activities take too long then you need to rethink your design. However if the delay is due to emails, then just store the emails in DB or in files. Create a cron job that sends out these queued emails every 5/10/15 minutes(and then delete them).

Answer 2

As per my comment elsewhere, spawning a long running process from PHP is a practical solution bearing in mind a few caveats if the performance problems are unavoidable.

However "send 3 mails" should not take an appreciable amount of time (I don't know what the database checks are). You need to spend some time looking at optimizing the existing process.

Other ways to solve the problem would be conventional batch processing, offloading the heavy lifting to a multi-process/multi-threaded daemon via a network call or asynchronous messaging system, or even a single threaded job processor using a message queue.

Answer 3

maybe you can once a user is registered flag him as pending in your database.

Then you could defer the work in a python or php routine running in the background continuously who would look for any pending request, do the check, send the emails and finally update the database accordingly.

the user during this time would be in a registered but pending status, but at least from a visitor point of view, he is not stuck waiting for everything to be processesed.

Answer 4

You cannot make a PHP script that has been started over a webserver process a background process.

I would check if I can optimize the database (probably, you have insufficient indizes), and if that doesn't fly, build a second process that gets started regularily (maybe once every five minutes or so) on the CLI side with a cronjob, showing the user a "Thank you for your registration" page...