Mastering PHP 7

Ticks

PCNTL relies on ticks for its signal handling callback mechanism. The official definition (http://php.net/manual/en/control-structures.declare.php) of a tick says:

A tick is an event that occurs for every N low-level tickable statements executed by the parser within the declare block. The value for N is specified using ticks=N within the declare block's directive section.

To elaborate on that, a tick is an event. Using the declare() language construct, we control how many statements it takes to set off a tick. We then use register_ tick_ function() to execute our function upon each fired tick. Ticks are basically a side-effect of a number of evaluated expressions; the side effect we can react to with our custom functions. While most ...