Can PHP scripts continue to run even if the user closed the browser?

Question

For example, there is a very simple PHP script which updates some tables on database, but this process takes a long time (maybe 10 minutes). Therefore, I want this script to continue processing even if the user closed the browser, because sometimes users do not wait and they close the browser or go to another webpage.

Answer 1

If the task takes 10 minutes, do not use a browser to execute it directly. You have lots of other options:

• Use a cronjob to execute the task periodically.
• Have the browser request insert a new row into a database table so that a regular cronjob can process the new row and execute the PHP script with the appropriate arguments
• Have the browser request write a message to queue system, which has a subscriber listening for such events (which then executes the script).

While some of these suggestions are probably overkill for your situation, the key, combining feature is to de-couple the browser request from the execution of the job, so that it can be completed asynchronously.

If you need the browser window updated with progress, you will need to use a periodically-executed AJAX request to retrieve the job status.

Answer 2

To answer your question directly, see ignore_user_abort

More broadly, you probably have an architecture problem here.

If many users can initiate this stuff, you'll want the web application to add jobs to some kind of queue, and have a set number of background processes that chew through all the work.