Running script that (might) take very long to finish in PHP

Question

I am running a php script as a cron job that might take very long time to finish. It will create a massive xml file and save it.

What should I think of if I implement it?

One thing I do is set max_execution_time for a long time:

ini_set('max_execution_time', 300);

Is there anything else I should do? Increase memory limit? Does it help if put header "keep-alive"?

What can I do to make sure the script will always run until everything neccessary is done?

Answer 1

You can remove the execution time limit by using the set_time_limit function passing 0 as parameter:

set_time_limit(0);

Adding HTTP headers won't help because as it is a cronjob script, you are not dealing with a browser.