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);
}

Answer 2

this worked for me

//avoid apache to kill the php running
ignore_user_abort(true);
//start buffer output
ob_start();

echo "show something to user1";
//close session file on server side to avoid blocking other requests
session_write_close();

//send length header
header("Content-Length: ".ob_get_length());
header("Connection: close");
//really send content, can't change the order:
//1.ob buffer to normal buffer,
//2.normal buffer to output
ob_end_flush();
flush();
//continue do something on server side
ob_start();
//replace it with the background task
sleep(20);

Answer 3

Complete version:

ignore_user_abort(true);//avoid apache to kill the php running
ob_start();//start buffer output

echo "show something to user";
session_write_close();//close session file on server side to avoid blocking other requests

header("Content-Encoding: none");//send header to avoid the browser side to take content as gzip format
header("Content-Length: ".ob_get_length());//send length header
header("Connection: close");//or redirect to some url: header('Location: http://www.google.com');
ob_end_flush();flush();//really send content, can't change the order:1.ob buffer to normal buffer, 2.normal buffer to output

//continue do something on server side
ob_start();
sleep(5);//the user won't wait for the 5 seconds
echo 'for diyism';//user can't see this
file_put_contents('/tmp/process.log', ob_get_contents());
ob_end_clean();

Answer 4

It's necessary to send these 2 headers:

Connection: close
Content-Length: n (n = size of output in bytes )

Since you need know the size of your output, you'll need to buffer your output, then flush it to the browser:

// buffer all upcoming output
ob_start();
echo "We'll email you as soon as this is done.";

// get the size of the output
$size = ob_get_length();

// send headers to tell the browser to close the connection
header("Content-Length: $size");
header('Connection: close');

// flush all output
ob_end_flush();
ob_flush();
flush();

// if you're using sessions, this prevents subsequent requests
// from hanging while the background process executes
if (session_id()) session_write_close();

/******** background process starts here ********/

Also, if your web server is using automatic gzip compression on the output (ie. Apache with mod_deflate), this won't work because actual size of the output is changed, and the Content-Length is no longer accurate. Disable gzip compression the particular script.

For more details, visit http://www.zulius.com/how-to/close-browser-connection-continue-execution

Answer 5

Your problem can be solved by doing some parallel programming in php. I asked a question about it a few weeks ago here: How can one use multi threading in PHP applications

And got great answers. I liked one in particular very much. The writer made a reference to the Easy Parallel Processing in PHP (Sep 2008; by johnlim) tutorial which can actually solve your problem very well as I have used it already to deal with a similar problem that came up a couple of days ago.

Answer 6

Latest Working Solution

    // client can see outputs if any
    ignore_user_abort(true);
    ob_start();
    echo "success";
    $buffer_size = ob_get_length();
    session_write_close();
    header("Content-Encoding: none");
    header("Content-Length: $buffer_size");
    header("Connection: close");
    ob_end_flush();
    ob_flush();
    flush();

    sleep(2);
    ob_start();
    // client cannot see the result of code below