Pages hang when another page from same site is loading

Question

Seeing some strange behavior in my application. Any time I have a long running script waiting for a response in the browser, any other page in the application will spin/hang after a click (even for very simple//static pages) until the original page finishes loading. This is a PHP5.3 based application using native PHP sessions on Apache 2.2.x.

This happens in multiple browsers in all our dev, qa, and production instances. I'm not sure where to start looking. Any advice?

Answer 1

Get all the data you need from the $_SESSION, and call session_write_close() before you are going to do something that takes a long time. Due to a PHP script still being active with that session, it locks the session (after all, it may write some data to that session that the next request needs).

If you need to write something to the session after you've done your long job, you can just call session_start() once again (provided you've not generated output yet), write to it, and after that the script may end, or maybe you repeat this cycle a few times.

Also, don't call session_start() if you don't need it, I see you mention 'static' pages. If a page does not need session data, avoid the overhead & locks it creates.