In my persute of being able to asynchronously execute PHP scripts, I cam across a program called Gearman. “Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages.” (from the gearman.org). Using Gearman, I was able to develop worker scripts that were tasked with executing long running jobs on distributed servers. Those jobs are triggered using a simple client API via the PEAR package Net_Gearman. This new ability was a huge win for my company and a partner company I work with. IF you are looking for a way to break jobs OUT of the HTTP request, Gearman is a great way to go!