To make use of multiple cores for some rather long processing operations I needed a way to fork multiple workers from a single PHP script multiple times lately. So I created this small project which implements this in a way, so that it should reusable by anybody.
The implementation and usage is pretty simple. There is in an interface
JobProvider
which has the methods hasJobs()
and getNextJob()
, which
you need to implement. The second method should return valid PHP callbacks
- for example Closures. Those are then executed (in parallel) by the executor.
I also implemented a ShellJobProvider
(which implements JobProvider
),
which is constructed from an array of shell commands, which then are executed
in parallel. A simple working example:
<?php require 'njq/environment.php'; $executor = new \njq\Executor(); $executor->run( new \njq\ShellJobProvider( array( 'echo 1 >> test', 'echo 2 >> test', 'echo 3 >> test', 'echo 4 >> test', 'echo 5 >> test', ) ), 4 ); ?>
The file test
will then contain something like (the order might vary):
5 4 3 2 1
The 4
(second parameter of \njq\Executor::run
) defines the number of
parallel processes to spawn. This should not exceed the number of available
cores in the most cases.
The job queue requires PHP 5.3 and the PHP PCNTL extension.