Timeout issue in amazon with PHP

Question

I have a PHP site in which I make an ajax call , in that ajax call I make call to an API that returns XML and I parse it, The problem it sometimes the xML is so huge that it takes many time, The load balancer in EC2 have timeout value of 20 minutes, so If my call is greater than this I get 504 Error, How can I solve this issue? I know its a server issue but how I can solve this?I dont think php.ini is helpful here

Answer 1

HTTP is a stateless protocol. It works best when responses to requests are made within a few seconds of the request. When you don't respond quickly, timeouts start coming into play. This might be a timeout you can control (fcgi process timeout) or one you can't control (third party proxy, client browser).

So what do you do when you have work that will take longer than a few seconds? Use a message queue of course.

The cheap way to do this is store the job in a db table and have cron read from the table and process the work. This can work on a small scale, but it has some issues when you try to get larger.

The proper way to do this is use a real message queue system. Amazon has SQS, but could just as well use Gearman, zeroMQ, rabbitMQ, and others to handle this.