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That's a symptom of session locking. You can work around that by having your long-running process call session_write_close before it starts. Assuming your long delay is an actual problem and any a symptom of poor code, there are a variety of ways to handle moving the task to a background process. Cron is a common and generally easy way to handle it. Another way is to use a job queue / message queue and separate worker services. Examples would be gearman, beanstalkd, rabbitmq, zeromq, and others.