Sorry to bother you guys. I'm actively looking for a fix for this and trying a bunch of stuff but a problem shared...

So, I'm using a MacBook Pro 2020 Intel variant. I run Laravel locally using Valet. My test suite is obviously using PHP to run as you'd expect. I'm on the latest version of valet and I'm using PHP 8.0.5.

When I run my test suite, I get the expected result:

$test = Fork::new()->run(fn() => 'Hello', fn() => 'World');
dd($test);

So far, so breezy. However, if I switch to the browser and hit a route that calls this code, the dd never takes place.

I've done some debugging (mainly by placing ray calls at various points in the Fork class), and the issue seems to stem from the call to pcntl_waitpid in Task on line 133. For whatever reason, in the browser, this always returns a status code of 0. The output on line 131 gets set correctly, but it still doesn't return the PID to say it has completed the closure.

Thanks for all your hard work! I'll keep looking into this from my end.

Love this package. However, when testing it for speeding up some of our tooling, I noticed that with performance degraded quickly with a larger number of processes. This makes sense, since forking a process hundreds or thousands of times is an expensive operation.

The feature allows limiting that concurrency, so fewer concurrent processes are forked. This drastically reduces CPU usage, since it doesn't have to manage so many processes and sockets.

During my testing, running 1000 concurrent tasks (that simply returned foo), took ~20 seconds. Limiting it to 100 concurrent processes reduced that to 14 seconds.

Possible Improvements

As implemented, it waits until all tasks of a concurrent group are completed before it starts the next group. It may be better to kick off a group, and as each task completes, start the next task until all are complete. However, this complicates things, and I am not convinced it would be any faster. Though, that is a gut feeling, not backed by any tests.

Open to suggestions.

I'm trying to return an key-val array with UTF-8 characters. When running without, it outputs the array fine. Running with 2 files (0.556048 mb) it works fine.

However, when running with 3+ files, 0.78592 mb, I get the unserialize error.

Run Code

// Get Files
$files = Storage::files();

// Returns a key-val array 
$results = Fork::new()
    >run(
         fn() => $this->filesToWordFreq(array_slice($files, 0, 3)),
      );

With the debug below.

   ErrorException 

  unserialize(): Error at offset 219249 of 219250 bytes

  at vendor/spatie/fork/src/Task.php:115
    111▕         $output = $this->output;
    112▕ 
    113▕         if (str_starts_with($output, self::SERIALIZATION_TOKEN)) {
    114▕             $output = unserialize(
  ➜ 115▕                 substr($output, strlen(self::SERIALIZATION_TOKEN))
    116▕             );
    117▕         }
    118▕ 
    119▕         return $output;

I've already increased my php memory limit, with ini_set('memory_limit', '16384M'); earlier.

Is there a hard limit to output size when using spatie/fork? As I was planning to run this with 27k files, not 3 just 3.

EDIT

When dumping the $output in output(), the value returned has been cut off. Does the output concatenation have some form of memory limit?

        foreach ($this->connection->read() as $output) {
            $this->output .= $output;
        }

Dumping the variable in execute() has the entire string, so something goes wrong after the execute() function.

As described in #31, when using pcntl_signal, socket_select may get interrupted which will cause an ErrorException being thrown.

The message is: socket_select(): unable to select [4]: Interrupted system call.

With this fix, the ErrorException is catched, and when the error number is 4 (the interrupted system call), the while loop is continued and the socket_select is run again.

I have no tests, as this is very difficult to test as this appears to be occurring randomly. I have tested it manually however and the error seems to be gone. Also the existing unit tests still succeeds.

This PR:

• removes trailing and additional whitespaces
• improves wording
• fixes typo

In special, the actual README says The closures to run shouldn't return objects, only primitives and arrays are allowed. However, it also says Finally, return values from child tasks are serialized using PHP's built-in serialize method. This means that you can return anything you can normally serialize in PHP, including objects.

So I guess we can remove that first statement, right?

Undefined array key 51266 vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Console/ServeCommand.php or this , Undefined array key 37790 at vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Console/ServeCommand.php : i get this errors when i try to excute from get api request but when i make a laravel consol command its works fine why is it ?

When using Fork together with pcntl calls like pcntl_signal (SIGTERM/SIGINT) or pcntl_alarm, I occasionally get the following error:

socket_select(): Unable to select [4]: Interrupted system call

This is a known issue and the common solution is to check for this error and retry again.

I'm using the following code:

use Curl\Curl;
use Spatie\Fork\Fork;

$output = Fork::new()->run(
    function () {
        $curl = new Curl();
        return $curl->get('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos');
    }
);

var_dump($output);

When getting all the todo's from the api it will throw an exception: Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 8178 of 8178 bytes .... /src/Task.php line 115

I already have increased the buffer size(tried increasing until the max) but still got this problem/bug. When i slice the array of items to 60 instead of 200 that come from that response.

Is there a solution for this problem/bug?