How to process multiple parallel requests from one client to one PHP script

Question

I have a webpage that when users go to it, multiple (10-20) Ajax requests are instantly made to a single PHP script, which depending on the parameters in the request, returns a different report with highly aggregated data.

The problem is that a lot of the reports require heavy SQL calls to get the necessary data, and in some cases, a report can take several seconds to load.
As a result, because one client is sending multiple requests to the same PHP script, you end up seeing the reports slowly load on the page one at a time. In other words, the generating of the reports is not done in parallel, and thus causes the page to take a while to fully load.

Is there any way to get around this in PHP and make it possible for all the requests from a single client to a single PHP script to be processed in parallel so that the page and all its reports can be loaded faster?

Thank you.

Answer 1

As far as I know, it is possible to do multi-threading in PHP. Have a look at pthreads extension.

What you could do is make the report generation part/function of the script to be executed in parallel. This will make sure that each function is executed in a thread of its own and will retrieve your results much sooner. Also, set the maximum number of concurrent threads <= 10 so that it doesn't become a resource hog.

Here is a basic tutorial to get you started with pthreads.

And a few more examples which could be of help (Notably the SQLWorker example in your case)