Why is the use of pcntl library in php is discoura

Question

Can anybody tell me why using the pcntl lib on production servers is discouraged? The PHP manual tells very briefly about it, and I'm in a dire need to use this library... Is there another way to do the same thing in php?

Answer 1

pcntl is discouraged in production environments because the functionality it supports (fork, process control, signal handling) are fairly explicitly things you should not be using in a CGI style application. Now, if you're writing a daemon or command line application in PHP, that is another matter...

From the PHP manual:

Process Control should not be enabled within a web server environment and unexpected results may happen if any Process Control functions are used within a web server environment.

Answer 2

one has to be clear about the differences of a php cli script and a sapi/cgi script. php on production systems may as well have support for pcntl.

the important thing here is to have 2 php config files. one for cli and one for cgi setup. one then has to disable pctnl in the cgi setup because the real security issue is, that forking a script when executed by the webserver may leave zombie processes flooding the system.

in a cli environment it might be necessary to be able to write scripts that fork...