The step after light speed is shown in nature by black holes. Space-time is faster than light.

Think of creating and using wormholes (minus all the FTL tech we currently use to define them) to "escape" the space-time that is currently lights boundaries as well.

That beyond FTL limit leads to the idea of escaping the universe created by the Big Bang, which leads to the idea that universes themselves may be as numerous as the stars are within them.

Oh to see the breakthrough!

Thanks for your very interesting web site. I'm begineer in cURL and I have a challenge to connect from a php page to a web server by using a cookie. This sample is very interesting for my challenge. I have just a question about cookie. It is uses to store cookie sent by server or you use data of this cookie file to send datas to the server. In fact, this php page runs everything night to get datas from energy logger with a http connection protected by a authentication form.

Nice feedback.. what I actually do instead of hardcoding the hostname is to use $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] to connect, since this is all meant to be done on the same site. The background processing is by another php process on the same server, though you could easily use multiple servers. You would also probably enjoy reading my post about a custom fsockopen class I wrote using snoopy, libcurl, etc..

Here is what I actually use when the server has access to many IP devices in order to make the connection come from the correct IP. I use the stream_socket_client to open the socket instead of fsockopen.

$opts=array('socket'=> array('bindto'=>"{$_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR']}:0"));
$h = stream_context_create($opts);
$fp = @stream_socket_client("{$host}:{$port}", $errno, $errstr, $tval, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT, $h);

About AskApache. And I actually do have a few questions for you if it's all right. Could it be only me or does it give the impression like some of the comments appear like left by brain dead people? :-P And, if you are posting at other places, I would like to follow anything fresh you have to post. Could you list of the complete urls of all your social sites like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?

$fp = fsockopen("www.askapache.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 30);

That 30 means 30sec. This is NOT async! In particular if the server on the other side is down this piece of code will hang for 30 seconds. Also the fwrite is going to take its sweet time to execute if there are problems on the network (that you can limit with stream_set_timeout($fp, $my_timeout). The best you can do is to set a low timeout on fsockopen to 0.1 (100ms) and $my_timeout to 100ms. You risk though, that the request will timeout.

Regarding @Alexandre solution:

You forgot to send a Connection: close (See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/124462/asynchronous-php-calls Christian Davén's answer). But if you use a MVC framework, it may not be practical.

I would also very careful to use set_time_limit(0);

This code also seems useless:

do{
  ...
  break;  // outie
} while(true);

Good points! The reason no email is being sent is because send_email is not a builtin function, meaning I defined that function myself but didn't publish it.

You are absolutely right about the redirect header! It should have been in the send-email.php script instead, I updated the post to reflect that.. But you are missing the major paradigm-shifting point of this technique, which is one of my all-time favorite hacks.

The idea behind this is that instead of POSTING to a php script that gets your POST variables AND processes those variables right then (such as a sending mail function), instead you POST the variables to a php script that DOES NOT process the variables itself, instead it sends the POST variables to a 2nd php script which is the script that does the actual processing (such as sending mail).

The reason that I say this is one of my favorite all-time hacks is because of 1 thing. The 1 thing is how the 1st script is the one posting to the 2nd script, meaning instead of having to wait for the processing to finish to receive the page response, you can receive the page response (in this case a thank you page redirect) INSTANTLY because the 1st script is the one who has to 'wait' for the 2nd script to finish, meanwhile the visitor who initiated the request is already at the thanks page while the 2nd script processes the request in the background.

I think I will write a new more detailed article on this, but it's one of those things that I consider so highly valuable that I am tempted to tell people to GRTFM.. not you but you know what I mean.

Anyway thanks for the feedback, I like the way you actually tested this stuff before you posted about it!!!!!!!!! Just like I do.

i am forced to use phpmailer

I have a form with :

$name = $_REQUEST['name'] ;
$email = $_REQUEST['email'] ;
$textarea = $_REQUEST['textarea'] ;
 
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->IsSMTP();
 
$mail->AddAddress("myemail@domain.com", "Full Name");

My email gets sent to myemail@domain.com ...

Is there a way to send a thank you email to $email ?

OK, so the send-email.php script is supposed to send the POST variables to waiting.php. If that happened, you wouldn't end up in your browser at waiting.php. All that would happen is that waiting.php would supposedly receive and process the POST variables.

So what's the point of the location redirect header in waiting.php? No-one is ever going to see it, so no-one is ever going to be redirected.

By the way, I say "the send-email.php script is *supposed* to send the POST variables to waiting.php" - because I find it doesn't send them. The email isn't sent, even when it's written properly as mail().