Spawning sub php scripts in a master script

Hey guys,

Currently designing a web crawler of sorts to download some XML feeds and
parse the data, was hoping to get it working in shared hosting
environments. Because it only scans slowly and is designed to use limited
resources, it shouldn't cause any problems or raise flags. The one issue
I am running up against is script max execution time.

Is there any way to spawn another instance of the script and close the
initial one, daisy chaining execution every few minutes to stay under the
limits? I'm unclear whether options like popen() a) work in shared
environments and b) allow the process which spawns another to be shut
down.

If anyone has any expertise here I'd absolutely love some direction!

Thanks.

Re: Spawning sub php scripts in a master script

On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:34:27 +0000, kiretose wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> Currently designing a web crawler of sorts to download some XML feeds
> and parse the data, was hoping to get it working in shared hosting
> environments. Because it only scans slowly and is designed to use
> limited resources, it shouldn't cause any problems or raise flags. The
> one issue I am running up against is script max execution time.
>
> Is there any way to spawn another instance of the script and close the
> initial one, daisy chaining execution every few minutes to stay under
> the limits? I'm unclear whether options like popen() a) work in shared
> environments and b) allow the process which spawns another to be shut
> down.
>
> If anyone has any expertise here I'd absolutely love some direction!
>
> Thanks.

for those following:

exec("php -f /var/www* filename here > /dev/null &", $array);
spawns it as a background process (on linux at least) and the script that
spawned it is closed.