Writing a daemon in PHP can be a very attractive prospect. You already have your website written, so you have all of this great code already. You just need it to run and keep track of some data or handle some data as it comes in by polling a database. All you do is.. make some infinite loop and..

<?php

$databse = MyGreatLibrary::getInstance();

while (true) {
	$data = $database->fetchNewData();

	if (!empty($data)) {
		try {
			MyGreatProcessor::process($data);

			$data->ack();
		} catch (Exception $e) {
			$data->fail();

			error_log("Error with processor: " . $e->getTraceAsString());
		}
	}

	sleep(15); // Wait for new data
}

Oh yes. Beautiful, we’re in business! What could possibly go wrong?

PHP isn’t meant to live forever

The biggest reason to let PHP die is that it is the intended use. It’s a system primarily designed to handle one request, die, and jump back up again, resetting itself to a pristine condition - like some sort of ElePHPhoenix.

When you take that glorious death of the process away from it you’re fighting what makes PHP so useful for the web - how it throws everything away after each request. When you try to work around this, and force PHP into roles that it’s not fit for you’ve subjugated yourself to be tormented.

You also will be bypassing most knowledge that sane developers have accumulated, and the standard PHP documentation will not be able to save you. It’s lacking and even non-existant in many cases.

Memory Leaks and Garbage Collection Problems

The largest problem with long running scripts has much to do with PHP’s garbage collection. In recent versions it’s become a more advanced system (version 5.3 and later) but it still can have quirks which may not be at first the most obvious, especially to those who are used to managing memory on their own.

This is something exacerbated because PHP itself never frees up memory back to the operating system to dole out to other processes. It will only allow it to be reallocated by other PHP data. This means that once it does allocate memory to a PHP process, it continues to hold onto it until the process is ended.

In many cases unset can be invoked and the garbage collection routines will eventually get to them. This is done by the internal implementation of data structures in PHP keeping a reference counter, incremented at every occurrence of use of the reference, and decremented when unset. There are a few cases in which unset does not fully decrement the reference counter. One of which is if there is, surprise, a reference to the data in some other area. This could be if another object or variable points to it, which at first thought may be straightforward may not always be easy to detect.

<?php

function parse_data($data, &$output) {
	$output['parsed'] = substr('foo', 'bar', $data->data);
	$output['original'] = $data;
}

$variable = new stdClass();
$variable->data = file_get_contents('large_file.txt');

$data = array();

parse_data($variable, $arr);

unset($variable);
// The references still exist to the zval that $variable pointed at

The other, more devious instance of data remaining in memory is cyclical references, in that one object refers to another object which refers back to the original object. Even when you unset both of the references to the objects, they still have a reference in that they refer to each other.

<?php

$super = new SuperGreat();

$super->selfReference = $super;

unset($super);
// $super's data continues to stay in memory unless
// the garbage collector is enabled

This can be resolved by enabling the more advanced garbage collection available in PHP 5.3 and later. This can be done either with the function gc_enable() or the php.ini setting zend.gc_enable=1.

Even then, you’re still at the whim of the garbage collector, which will only collect the unused references when the root buffer fills up. Thus, calling gc_collect_cycles() may be required in situations where memory is at a premium.

These issues with memory leaks do not always pertain to just your code, either. Many third party PHP libraries can be at fault as well. If they don’t follow the same strict rules regarding reference counting and hinting to the garbage collector that data is available to be collected memory leaks can occur. This does not get into extensions, which are often never meant to be running for long periods of time and do have the ability to mismanage memory. A good example of this is PHP’s SPL library.

<?php

class Collection extends ArrayObject {
	protected $iterator;

	public function getIterator() {
		// Well, this is a heavy object to make, let's memoize it
		if (!isset($this->iterator)) {
			$this->iterator = new ArrayIterator($this);
		}

		return $this->iterator;
	}
}

$collection = new Collection([ 'foo', 'bar' ]);

foreach ($collection as $item) {
	echo $item;
}

unset($collection);
gc_collect_cycles();
// Memory from collection is never freed

There was a bug opened, but no resolution aside from manually destroying the cycles has come of it. The reason that it happens is because, as described in the bug, the garbage collector relies on get_properties’ HashTable to know which references are held by a given object.

In a traditional request PHP cleans up all variables during shut down of the engine in preparation for the next request. As a long running script intends to never shut down and allow that process to happen memory leaks escalate from being a minor blip to taking down entire servers.

Resource Descriptor limit

When opening a file, a connection to a database using some APIs, or working with various extensions, you get back a resource instead of an object. These resources allow PHP to correctly communicate with the open stream you’ve instantiated.

Resource Descriptors, however are not a renewable resource in PHP as of the 5.5 release. The counter is limited to 2^32 - 1. What should happen is that the open stream should choose the lowest file descriptor not currently open. PHP, however, does not. Once a resource is opened it can’t be reused. Closing it does not send it back to the available pool of descriptors. The related bug has been open for nearly 4 years now, so while it is possible that it’s being worked on, it is even more possible that it will not be fixed for some time.

However, seeing as there are then roughly 8.6 billion available descriptors this is unlikely to be much of an issue in most real world situations. Just one of the many little problems that exist with running a PHP script for a long period of time.

Other minor concerns

With long running scripts one of the more lucrative features of PHP doesn’t come into play, either - how it handles updates. If PHP never shuts down the code is never unloaded, and new code is never loaded back in. This means that a user would have to manually shut down the worker in some way, usually by killing the process. One way to work around this would be to keep track of when the script was started and compare it against the modified time of the file, then exiting when it is safe to do so. Not a pretty way to handle updates by far.

Many libraries rely on open connections to external services, and for a large range of reasons that connection could be closed after a long enough time, especially if the script is sitting in a “waiting” state for a while. An example of such behavior could be the error message MySQL server has gone away. This requires boilerplate code to be in place, verifying that the connection is fresh and available when processing data.

What can I do about it?

In most cases the need for a long running script just isn’t there. For some people, PHP isn’t needed at all, and a language better suited for writing daemons could be chosen.

There also are many techniques for handling the processing of data in the background without using long running PHP scripts. One such would be the use of job queues and short lived PHP workers started by Supervisord, such as Beanstalkd, Gearman, or Celery. Many job queues allow configuration to limit the number of jobs workers will handle before restarting, thus negating the problems that can crop up.

It’s possible to write long lived PHP daemons. That doesn’t mean it’s the best use of anyone’s time, especially yours.