jquery ajax call not asynchronous

Question

I am fresh to jQuery\'s implementation of it\'s AJAX methods.

I have a simple setup that accesses two different pages, one which takes 10 seconds to complete (I have

Answer 1

I have discovered the cause of the javascript call hanging.

To prevent a race condition from occurring with user session data, PHP locks the data until one of two conditions occur.

1. The previously called PHP script calls session_write_close().

2. The previously called PHP script completes processing and implicitly calls session_write_close().

Following the logic that a call to the server that does not call session_start() should allow true asynchronous calls, I created a dummy PHP page that just spits out a simple string and called to that page every second while the 10 second script ran. It ran perfectly.

The solution came from reading this discussion on the symfony forums.