This guide was originally written for a PHPNW meetup – more information on the group is available here
Whenever we want to carry out lengthy tasks or process large batches of data, we should consider executing that process in the background. The most typical way of doing this is through “cron jobs” – tasks which are scheduled to be executed at regular intervals; every 2 minutes, or at 6am every Sunday. Alternatively, you can have the web browser instigate the task by using something like shell_exec(). This guide presents a third alternative, system level daemons.
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