What do you do when you have a feature in your Web application that takes longer than a second or two to finish? You need some type of offline processing solution. Check out several methods for offline servicing of long-running jobs in your PHP application.

He talks about cron and its role in offline processing (including a basic primer on its format) before getting into the example itself. He looks at three examples:

• building an email queue
• building a generic queue system
• dumping out the database