How to Make Async Requests in PHP

Sorry if I am misunderstanding, but why not use Gearman (<a href="http://gearman.org/" rel="nofollow">http://gearman.org/</a>). We wrote a nice blog post on how we use Gearman for tracking API requests to Mixpanel <a href="http://blog.nodesocket.com/how-we-tracking-api-requests-with-mixpanel-an" rel="nofollow">http://blog.nodesocket.com/how-we-tracking-api-requests-with...</a>).<p>Or, use React (<a href="http://reactphp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://reactphp.org/</a>) a PHP async library.

Forking seems like a very expensive solution to the problem. Especially in php where exec() doesn't actually do what exec in unix does in general (contrary to plain exec which you'd use after a fork, PHP's exec still runs a shell).<p>If you use their API even just one time per request, be aware that they will fork, execute a shell, fork again and then execute curl. Imagine where this is going when you use multiple API calls per request.<p>As this is "just" about analytics, why not use a UDP packet or two? Sure - they might not get delivered, but is that really so bad for analytics? Sending out a UDP package is very fast and there will be no waiting going on at all.

Happy to see you got PHP running, I imagine the next step is a Wordpress Plugin to handle it automatically.<p>I suspect that you'll frequently need to fallback to the socket approach. I imagine a lot of shared hosts block the capability to run exec (Godaddy, Hostgator, other common php hosts), and I believe that's where a lot of PHP lives.

curl_multi???!!!