Posted by Andrew on 11/12/05 20:04

Look into the ignore_user_abort and set_time_limit functions.

Print a nice 'please wait' page and flush it to the webserver, then
when you're done with your processing, check if the user is still
waiting (there are functions for that too, read the manual) and flush a
"done" message.

Another alternative would be to trigger some external (seperate to the
webserver) program or script to do the work, like a perl script, and
run it into the background from PHP.

Remember, most users won't wait more than 20 seconds, so consider
alternative pre-processing and caching strategies if they are feasible.

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