What are the pitfalls of running a program with PHP "exec" function that causes the entire PHP website to become unresponsive?

Running a program with the PHP "exec" function can cause the entire PHP website to become unresponsive if the executed program takes too long to complete or if it enters an infinite loop. To solve this issue, you can use the "proc_open" function instead of "exec" to run the program asynchronously, allowing the website to remain responsive while the program is running. 

$descriptorspec = [
    0 => ['pipe', 'r'],
    1 => ['pipe', 'w'],
    2 => ['pipe', 'w']
];

$process = proc_open('your_program_here', $descriptorspec, $pipes);

if (is_resource($process)) {
    fclose($pipes[0]);
    fclose($pipes[1]);
    fclose($pipes[2]);
    proc_close($process);
}

Keywords

PHP exec function unresponsive website performance

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