Both this post on the Zend Developer Zone and tis post on the International PHP Magazine's website point to a new article over on the IBM developerWorks website by Jack Herrington, Batch processing with PHP.

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

Each example comes complete with code and descriptions to help you work them up on you very own system.