php execute a background process

Question

I need to execute a directory copy upon a user action, but the directories are quite large, so I would like to be able to perform such an action without the user being aware

Answer 1

You might try a queuing system like Resque. You then can generate a job, that processes the information and quite fast return with the "processing" image. With this approach you won't know when it is finished though.

This solution is intended for larger scale applications, where you don't want your front machines to do the heavy lifting, so they can process user requests. Therefore it might or might not work with physical data like files and folders, but for processing more complicated logic or other asynchronous tasks (ie new registrations mails) it is nice to have and very scalable.