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PHP & Cron - Basic Questions 4 Newbie

Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 2:36 pm
by maple_toast
So I've been learning PHP for about a year now. I've built several small and a few bigger applications. Now I'm on an applications which requires cron. Suffice it to say, it's kicking my arse. :evil:

For those of you who are experienced, perhaps you can help answer some of my questions...

1) When I run the script directly by calling it in the browser, there are not any errors and it completes in about 2 min 40 seconds. Yet when I call it in cron, it can take as much as an hour to complete, and sometimes it hangs.

2) I've been using two different commands: /usr/bin/php -q /path/to/script and wget -q http :// direct path to script .php . Is there a better way to do this?

3) I've duplicated the script into different filenames, such as fileA.php, and fileB.php. If I want to do twice the work, would it make sense to cron fileA.php and cron fileB.php?

4) Am I correct in assuming that cron will run my php script the same way that a web browser would?

Thanks for your help. It's much appreciated!

M.

Re: PHP & Cron - Basic Questions 4 Newbie

Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 3:29 pm
by Celauran
1. Without seeing the code, I wouldn't even hazard a guess.
2. Calling PHP directly from the CLI should be more efficient as it removes the additional overhead of having to call Apache.
3. Why? How do you mean by 'doing twice the work'?
4. Yes.

Re: PHP & Cron - Basic Questions 4 Newbie

Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 3:20 am
by maple_toast
The purpose of the cron is to run user-submitted "jobs". Since I have the cron set to run once a minute, I figured that running two processes would do twice the work. That's why I was testing out a fileA.php and fileB.php system.

I'm still confused as to why the cron is so inconsistent on its running time. Running it in the browser still gets around 2 min 40 sec. In cron, it can run 3min to as much as 10 hours now.

Since the process takes 2 min 40 seconds (when calling it in a browser) I set the cron to run every 5 minutes. Does the cron need to be finished with a script before the next cron runs, if it's going to call the same script?

Re: PHP & Cron - Basic Questions 4 Newbie

Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 8:33 am
by Celauran
Out of curiosity, have you compared execution time for CLI vs. wget?