Occasionally, I've needed to process a lot of information from a script, but
I don't want to worry about PHP timing out or the user aborting the script
(by clicking on another link or closing the window). Initially, I
investigated register_shutdown_function()
for this; it will fire off a process once the page finishes loading.
Unfortunately, the process is still a part of the current connection, so it
can be aborted in the same way as any other script (i.e., by hitting stop,
closing the browser, going to a new link, etc.).
However, there's another setting initialized via a function that can
override this behaviour -- i.e., let the script continue running after the
abort. This is ignore_user_abort(). By
setting this to true, your script will continue running after the fact.
This sort of thing would be especially good for bulk uploads where the
upload needs to be processed -- say, for instance, a group of images or
email addresses.
