joopschilder/php-async

Asynchronous PHP callable processing with return values via SysV shared memory.
Requires the php-sysvshm extension.
Works with PHP >= 5.3 due to shm_attach(...) returning a resource instead of an int.

Note: This package should not be used in a CGI environment, as each PHP runtime that makes a call on the async functions WILL create an 8MB shared memory block in RAM. If you run out of memory: you have been warned.
Note: This project is an experiment. It is, however, available on packagist. If you think your project lacks witchcraft and black magic, just add this package to your composer.json:

{
    "require": {
        "joopschilder/php-async": "dev-master"
    }
}

Examples

Promises

You can actually return anything that is serializable in PHP: objects, arrays, strings, you name it.

<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$promise = async(function() {
	sleep(random_int(1, 5));
	return getmypid();
});

// ... some other work

$promise->resolve();
$pid = $promise->getValue();
printf("Me (%d) and %d have worked very hard!\n", getmypid(), $pid);

The shutdown handler and destructors should take care of the rest.

Asynchronous curl requests

... though you should probably look into curl multi handles for this: curl_multi_init() on PHP.net.

<?php
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Create the body for the process
$process = function(string $url) {
    $handle = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
    curl_setopt($handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    $response = curl_exec($handle);
    curl_close($handle);
    file_put_contents(uniqid('download_'), $response);
};

// Define some urls we want to download
$urls = [
    'example.com',
    'example2.com',
    'some.other.domain'
];

// And away we go!
foreach($urls as $url)
    async($process, $url);

That's all there is to it.

What's next?

• Refactoring
• More functionality (maybe)
• Improving stability
• Add a diagram that explains this witchcraft