PHP中的后台脚本？

Question

I'm trying to create a script that runs in the background automatically and cycles through itself repeatedly.  I'm accessing a websites API which does have a limit on number of requests per minute (1 every 2 seconds).  If I try to have this run as a normal PHP page it would take 28 hours to cycle through all the information that I want to collect. 

I want to take this collected information and store it in a MySQL database so that I can access parts of it on a separate page later. 

Is there a way that I can do this - have a constantly running script execute in the background on a web server? An I right in doing this in PHP, or should I be using another language. I have quite a bit of experience in PHP, but not so much in other languages.  Thanks. 

Answer 1

Do you have experience using cron jobs to handle background tasks? You'd need shell access, but aside that it's pretty simple. Definitely more efficient when you don't need to output anything.

As for language - PHP is perfectly capable. This would depend on the processing, in my opinion. Supposing the API you are calling fetches images and processes them, resizing and so on. I might go with python if that;s the case, but I don't know what you're really up to.