ansaurus

Question

Answer 1

A:

Use something along these lines

//may be also add headers for cache-control and expires (IE)
header("Connection: close"); //tells browser that connection will be closed
ob_start();
//generate your output
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
ob_end_flush();
flush();
//continue statistic processing

jitter 2009-11-08 11:37:20

I tried this and if I add something like sleep(20); after the flush(); the browser (FireFox 3.5) still shows the loading indicator for an additional 20 seconds.

AWinter 2009-11-08 11:45:53

I finally got this working but only if I include header("Content-Encoding: none"); right below header("Connection: close"); any thoughts on why this might be?

AWinter 2009-11-08 13:17:25

Any ideas on how to get this working with out setting header("Content-Encoding: none"); I'd rather keep gzip running when possible

AWinter 2009-11-08 13:20:50

Setting encoding to none might prevent (e.g) apache from using mod_gzip which has its own buffer and thus could prevent the above script from working. For my script to work you might have to disable gzip for this script and/or disable apache output buffering.

jitter 2009-11-08 13:23:15

I found a way to get this working with gzip. I updated my original post with the change so the code will be nice and pretty.

AWinter 2009-11-08 13:57:58

Answer 2

A:

I don't think there is a way to notify the browser that the output is complete, at least from the script that sends the output. If you use some other script that will monitor the output of your first script and use an iframe maybe then you might be able to do it.

The browser knows when the output is complete when the page is considered loaded. That is what the browser knows.

andreas 2009-11-08 11:39:08

Answer 3

A:

You could fork a new php process in the background and let that take care of the stats. Something like: shell_exec('php stats.php &');

The & at the end makes sure that it's run in the background, so even if the stats.php takes 20 seconds, the visitor won't notice it. You would probably need to pass data to the stats script, which you can do by passing in parameters, like this:

shell_exec('php stats.php -b '. escapeshellarg($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) .' &');

In stats.php, you'd use the $argv variable to get that data.

But I wouldn't do this if the statistics code doesn't take that long to run, since forking a new process for every page load like this has some overhead. I don't know what it is that makes the stats code take a long time to process, but another solution might be to insert the raw data into a database, and let a background job work on that data to create usable statistics. That could be done either by a cron job, or having a screen run in an infinte loop that processes the queue.

Anders Ekdahl 2009-11-08 12:26:31

In PHP, if you want the new process to run in the background, you must also redirect stdout, e.g. `shell_exec('php stats.php > /dev/null `

Ben James 2009-11-08 12:37:58

True, forgot about that. It's probably good to direct stderr to stdout as well, and then direct stdout to /dev/null.

Anders Ekdahl 2009-11-08 14:43:34

Answer 4

A:

Try to move your statistics code to a seperate function and call this function with an ajax call in the dom.ready or onload event in javascript code on your rendered page like in this meta code:

<html>
  <script type="text/javascript">
    dom.onready = Ajax.call(location.href + '?do_stats');
  </script>
  <body>...
</html>

The dom.ready event can be provided by jQuery or Prototype libraries. Downside is it will only work with js enabled.

Alternatively you could just record all needed information for the stats to a database and dispatch a script collecting the queued data from there and working on it in the background - eg by using cron.

hurikhan77 2009-11-08 13:52:38

Unfortunately most Japanese mobile phones don't support javascript and in Japan especially they can usually account for 50% or more of your total user base.

AWinter 2009-11-08 13:56:56

Ok, that important point was missing from your question. You should amend it.

hurikhan77 2009-11-08 14:02:43

I did forget to mention that. Sorry.

AWinter 2009-11-08 14:11:08

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

PHP Output complete notification

related questions