[SOLVED] continuously running process

[calabiyau]

Not sure if this is the right place to post but nowhere else seems to fit.  Would it be  a high load on a server to have a php process run from the executable, continuously looking for existence of files in a folder and processing them if they are there?  Just an endless loop that checks for the existence of the files.  If they are there, do something with them, if not keep looping?  It is not a web accessible application but something for server admin.  Anybody have experience with such things. 

[tanvir]

The server load depends on what really your process is doing. If it is doing something very resource incentive, than it will slow your server down. You might wanna use cron to run the process after every 10 minutes.

[calabiyau]

Yeah I want this to be very real time if possible.  the thing is, most of the time there will be no processing going on at all, just checking for the existence of files...most often won't find any, therefore just keep looping and checking the folder.  When it finds a file, it has to open, read about 1 line of contents and maybe write to one additional file with that information.  but maybe I can CRON it every couple of minutes instead.

[trq]

If most of the time there is no processing going on you should be fine. PHP is a pretty versatile language, Ive had servers running that where written entirely in php without problem.

[calabiyau]

kay thanks.