PHP timer without script pause/delay

Question

So I just want to write this quick and dirty module to a program that takes the current time, echos a string, and then waits x minutes and echos another string. The only thing is, is this little module stops the rest of the program until it's finished. Any way around this?

Answer 1

You can duplicate the current process on which it is running to leave 1 process waiting and the other one do what it has to do.

To fork a PHP process you have to use pcntl_fork

Answer 2

Ofcourse forking would do the trick, but why not use the ticks functionality in PHP?

Consider this example:

declare(ticks=1);

function tick() {
   // check if the interval is correct before proceding
   $mem = memory_get_usage(true);
   echo "Using $mem bytes right now";
}

register_tick_function('tick');

// do all kinds of things in your main program here
while(true) {
   usleep(50000);
}

While sleeping it will periodically call the tick function, without having to invoke it manually. The only caveat is that if a particular operation takes a very long time to complete (e.g. a database query) the ticks will not fire until this operation is complete.