Calling rand/mt_rand on forked children yields identical results

Question

I\'m writing a script that needs to execute concurrent tasks in PHP.

I ran a little test and ran into strange result. I\'m using pcntl_fork to generate a child. The

Answer 1

I really think you should look at pthreads which provides multi-threading that is compatible with PHP based on Posix Threads.

Simple as

class AsyncOperation extends Thread {
    public function __construct($arg) {
        $this->arg = $arg;
    }
    public function run() {
        if ($this->arg) {
            echo 'child ' . $this->arg . ' starts' . "\n";
            $wait_time = mt_rand(1, 4);
            echo 'sleeping for ' . $wait_time . "\n";
            sleep($wait_time);
            echo 'child ' . $this->arg . ' ends' . "\n";
        }
    }
}
$t = microtime(true);
$g = array();
foreach(range("A","D") as $i) {
    $g[] = new AsyncOperation($i);
}
foreach ( $g as $t ) {
    $t->start();
}

Output

child B starts
sleeping for 3
child B ends
child C starts
sleeping for 3
child C ends
child A starts
sleeping for 4
child A ends
child D starts
sleeping for 4
child D ends

Answer 2

That is because all children start with the same state (fork() duplicates the code and data segments). And since rand and mt_rand are pseudorandom generators, they will all generate the same sequence.

You will have to re-initialize the random generator, for example with the process/thread ID or read a few bytes from /dev/urandom.