How do I close a connection early?

Question

I\'m attempting to do an AJAX call (via JQuery) that will initiate a fairly long process. I\'d like the script to simply send a response indicating that the process has star

Answer 1

I'm on a shared host and fastcgi_finish_request is setup to exit scripts completely. I don't like the connection: close solution either. Using it forces a separate connection for subsequent requests, costing additional server resources. I read the Transfer-Encoding: cunked Wikipedia Article and learned that 0\r\n\r\n terminates a response. I haven't thoroughly tested this across browsers versions and devices, but it works on all 4 of my current browsers.

// Disable automatic compression
// @ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'Off');
// @ini_set('output_buffering', 'Off');
// @ini_set('output_handler', '');
// @apache_setenv('no-gzip', 1);

// Chunked Transfer-Encoding & Gzip Content-Encoding
function ob_chunked_gzhandler($buffer, $phase) {
    if (!headers_sent()) header('Transfer-Encoding: chunked');
    $buffer = ob_gzhandler($buffer, $phase);
    return dechex(strlen($buffer))."\r\n$buffer\r\n";
}

ob_start('ob_chunked_gzhandler');

// First Chunk
echo "Hello World";
ob_flush();

// Second Chunk
echo ", Grand World";
ob_flush();

ob_end_clean();

// Terminating Chunk
echo "\x30\r\n\r\n";
ob_flush();
flush();

// Post Processing should not be displayed
for($i=0; $i<10; $i++) {
    print("Post-Processing");
    sleep(1);
}