I am currently hosting a research project on Heroku using PHP and the Facebook API. It is somewhat intensive, so it is running past Heroku's time limit of 30 seconds for a response. Using their support, they suggest to use a background process to do this (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/background-jobs-queueing), but they don't say how I should do this for PHP. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Try the Symfony 2 process component. Its got a nice and simple OO interface for working with processes.
use Symfony\Component\Process\PhpProcess;
$command = file_get_contents('/hello_world.php');
if ( $command ) {
$process = new PhpProcess($command);
$process->run();
if ($process->isSuccessful()) {
$output = $process->getOutput();
// ...
}
else {
throw new Exception($process->getErrorOutput());
}
}