Introduction

This is a step-by-step tutorial to build a multithreaded daemon in PHP. I will point out several problems caused by a greedy implementation and will give some ways to solve them. I will also have a look at which functions are provided by PHP, what are their advantages and their drawbacks, and how to use them. I will finally give a working implementation of a class that would expose every functions needed to run such a daemon. The implementation will be written in PHP5.

Below are the steps of this tutorial :

1. Introduction (this part)
2. Why to use a daemon ?
3. What is provided by PHP to handle multithreading ?
4. Roots of a conceptual implementation
5. The basic implementation of the multithreading class
6. Limitations of the basic implementation and future work.