PTask - Parallel Processing for PHP

PTask is a library for easily implementing parallel processing of arbitrary jobs in your PHP application. It allows you to implement your own job processor for your applications business logic, and handles all the details of dispatching and aggregating job results for you via one blocking call.

PTask is built on ZeroMQ (http://zeromq.org).

Example

To create your own basic client/server setup see the ./example folder.

php server.php &
php client.php

To see something cool, try starting the client before the server.

Requirements

• PHP 5
• ZeroMQ
• pcntl

NB: PTask does not work on Windows

ZeroMQ

Full details for installing ZeroMQ are available on the website.

http://www.zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software

When you've done that you'll need to install the binding for PHP.

http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:php

pcntl

The server needs to fork worker processes for handling processing jobs, and this requires PHP has the pcntl module loaded. This can either be compiled in with PHP, or compiled as an extension and loaded from your php.ini.

Compile with PHP

To include pcntl when compiling PHP just include the following flag to configure

--enable-pcntl

Loading as a module

To load pcntl as a module, download the PHP source code, then...

cd php-X.X.X/ext/pcntl
phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

Then add the following line to your php.ini

extension=pcntl.so