while ($process1->isRunning() && $process2->isRunning()) {
sleep(1);
}
should of course be:
while ($process1->isRunning() || $process2->isRunning()) {
sleep(1);
}
do it yourself with a fork: php also provides the possibility to use forking through the function pcntl_fork(). A good tutorial on how to do this can be found here but i strongly recommend not to use it, since fork is a crime against humanity and especially against oop.
Multithreading
With multithreading all your threads share their resources so you can easily communicate between and synchronize them without a lot of overhead. On the other side you have to know what you are doing, since race conditions and deadlocks are easy to produce but very difficult to debug.
Standard php does not provide any multithreading but there is an (experimental) extension that actually does - pthreads. Its api documentation even made it into php.net.
With it you can do some stuff as you can in real programming languages :-) like this:
class MyThread extends Thread {
public function run(){
//do something time consuming
}
}
$t = new MyThread();
if($t->start()){
while($t->isRunning()){
echo ".";
usleep(100);
}
$t->join();
}
Test it with the script above with some sleep or something right there where the comment is.
And now the big BUT: Although this really works, php wasn't originally made for multithreading. There exists a thread-safe version of php and as of v5.4 it seems to be nearly bug-free but using php in a multi-threaded environment is still discouraged in the php manual (but maybe they just did not update their manual on this, yet). A much bigger problem might be that a lot of common extensions are not thread-safe. So you might get threads with this php extension but the functions you're depending on are still not thread-safe so you will probably encounter race conditions, deadlocks and so on in code you did not write yourself...
