Unable to Timeout Exec

[tosta]

This script sometimes hangs like 20mins until server PHP will show timeout error, and I don’t know how to set the time limit to kill it. set_time_limit doesn’t do anything. I have also read that exec is missing direct timeout command.

$argv="http://google.com";  ///some URL'S stay hanging
 

$command = "wkhtmltoimage $argv test.jpg";
///set_time_limit doesn't work
set_time_limit(5);
exec($command, $output, $ret);
if ($ret) {
    echo "error fetching screen dump\n";
    die;
}

Please help, Thank you

[TomB]

The problem is exec is a blocking command (it pauses execution until it finishes). You need to run the command slightly differently. On Linux, suffixing the command with & will actually put the output as the command after &. You will also need to redirect both stdout and stderr to /dev/null/. On windows you can use the start command:

Linux:

$command = "wkhtmltoimage $argv test.jpg > /dev/null 2>/dev/null &";

Windows:

$command = "start wkhtmltoimage $argv test.jpg";

[tosta]

Thank you, I like the Linux version, this works perfectly and really “much faster” than before(too fast maybe)… but I ran into other problems with this, because this script is part of a bigger script and it’s too fast. So sleep(5); after it will fix everything for now.

Thank you again!

[tosta]

I have noticed that if using > /dev/null 2>/dev/null & on some bigger and slower sites the command fails, lack of time to load the site or something. Without the command > /dev/null 2>/dev/null & works the slower sites too, but then some sites may hang… I haven’t found a 100% working solution… are there any simple suggestions to make this simple script work?

Thank you