Keep web server working after returning output to client (in php)

I am having a PHP web page which has a button. Whenever the user click this button, an AJAX request is sent to the server, and an email is sent back to him. A notification is also displayed on the screen. (It's similar to commenti开发者_运维知识库ng on Facebook, the message is displayed, while the server keeps working to send emails).

Since sending email takes time, I want the server to return the output to the user first, then keeps working to send email.

Anyone knows how to achieve this in PHP? Thanks.

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Really this is the same question as I am running through a php background process problem

And as per my answer there, if the email is taking a long time to process then there's something wrong with your MTA config.

But assuming that might be something you can't fix, you might consider sending the email using a callback invoked via register_shutdown_function() after your code does an explicit exit;

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Sending an email from php shouldn't take very long, since all it has to do is send a message to the mailserver, which can take it's time sending the email after.

However, to answer your question, you can execute another php script as a background process, and have that script send the email. On a linux box it's as easy as:

exec('php phpscript.php > /dev/null &');

Which will execute phpscript.php as a background process, so that your current script won't wait for it to finish. If you want you can redirect the output somewhere other than /dev/null so you can actually view the output later.

You might need to use php-cli instead of php. Depending on how your server is set up.