Parallel processing/forking in PHP to speed up checking large arrays

Question

I have a php script on my website that is designed to give a nice overview of a domain name the user enters. It does this job quite well, however it is very slow. This might have something to do with the fact it's checking an array of 64 possible domain names, and THEN moving on to checking nameservers for A records/MX records/NS records etc.

What i would like to know, is it possible to run multiple threads/child processes of this? So that it will check multiple ellements of the array at once, and generate the output a lost faster?

I've put an example of my code in a pastebin (so to avoid creating a huge and spammy post on here) http://pastebin.com/Qq9qKtP9

In perl I can do something like this:

  $fork = new Parallel::ForkManager($threads);
  foreach(Something here){
  $fork->start and next;
  $fork->finish;
  }

And i could make the loop run in as many processes as needed. Is something similar possible in PHP or any other ways you can think of to speed this up? The main issue is, cloudflare has a timeout, and often it will take long enough CF blocks the response happening.

Thanks

Answer 1

* Never Mind Support !! *

You never want to create threads (or additional processes for that matter) in direct response to a web request.

If your frontend is instructed to create 60 threads every time someone clicks on page.php, and 100 people come along and request page.php at once, you will be asking your hardware to create and execute 6000 threads concurrently, to say nothing of the threads used by operating system services and other software. For obvious reasons, this does not, and will never scale.

Rather you want to separate out those parts of the application that require additional threads or processes and communicate with this part of the application via some kind of sane RPC. This means that the backend of the application can utilize concurrency via pthreads or forking, using a fixed number of threads or processes, and spreading work as evenly as possible across all available resources. This allows for an influx of traffic; it allows your application to scale.

I won't write example code, it seems altogether too trivial.