Long Polling - Best way to timing out a request after certain seconds

Question

Taking a long polling request, if the server does not respond after a certain period an unpleasant error is returned (405 with nginx). How to expire the request with PHP after certain seconds? How many seconds you recommend? Thanks you in advance.

Answer 1

Ok then here's how i would do it , I already built a similar script for one of my spare time projects, instead of doing a full infinite loop, i would do a loop with a limited number of loops, and a sleep in the middle to save the extensive cpu usage, might not exactly how your code is designed but it's good, and it stops gracefully with a normal 200 code, of course you can change the loop counter and the sleep value to suit your code.

<?php
    header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
    header("Content-Type: text/event-stream");
    $i = 60;
    while($i--){
        echo "data: ".date("Y-m-d H:i:s")."\n\n";
        echo "\n\n";
        ob_flush();
        flush();
        sleep(1);
    }

Then leave it for the javascript to reconnect and start a new loop.

PS: Do you actually get your data to stream? or does the stream stay blank till the connection is terminated?