[Answered] Php, Sockets, And Persistent Service Design

[reinderien]

Hello.

 

First, thanks for this service - it's a great testbed for web app design, and the functionality is quite good especially considering the price.

 

I'm trying to learn how to design a socket server in PHP. This server would run in the background, and perform low-bandwidth operations over TCP. http://www.heliohost...s/languages/php indicates that this installation of PHP supports sockets, which is good.

 

I face several challenges. Firstly, I think this would require the use of a cron job that checks for a certain process string (the PHP interpreter + script), and if it does not exist, starts it and backgrounds it with an "&". However, even my most rudimentary cron job experiments that don't even use PHP seem to not work - scheduling a daily cron job in cPanel to concatenate a simple string to a file in my home directory does not seem to produce that file. So I don't know what's going on there.

 

Also, reading from an account of a partially related situation (http://www.helionet...._mode__threaded), it seems that by default it is impossible to have a TCP port open for general use.

 

Do you have any advice to address these issues?

 

Thank you.

[Guest xaav]

Sorry, but HelioHost does not support socket servers due to security reasons. Also, I do not know of any other host (even paid) that supports this without purchasing a Virtual Private Server.

 

However, you could have your web page call a script via ajax every five seconds to check for updates to some information.

[reinderien]

Sorry, but HelioHost does not support socket servers due to security reasons. Also, I do not know of any other host (even paid) that supports this without purchasing a Virtual Private Server.

 

However, you could have your web page call a script via ajax every five seconds to check for updates to some information.

 

Thanks for the information. I've since developed a workaround that seems to be working for "push" support: have the client connect to the server running PHP; have the server and client both maximize their timeouts; and then have the server echo and flush whenever something interesting happens.

[Guest xaav]

Glad your question got answered!

 

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