telegram bot - To send a message with a delay in PHP (without "sleep" function)

Question

Trying to make a dice-roll function in my telegram bot. How it works right now:

• When a user sends "roll" bot replies with sendDice method and sends another message with result like "you rolled 5, you won and blah-blah .." > how it looks <

The problem is — the second message should not appear instantly, ideally after dice-roll animation is finished. My first and obvious try on that was to add "sleep(3)" before sending the second message, and it worked fine, until I realized it completely delays the execution of my script for those 3 seconds. (if two users rolled at the same time, one of the users has to wait until another guy's roll will be finished). So it's not cool

What can I use? :c

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65830857/to-send-a-message-with-a-delay-in-php-without-sleep-function

Answer 1

The easiest option is to add the "task" to the "queue". The queue can be a table in the database with timestamps and chat id, when and to whom to send a message. Start another process, for example, which is started by cron, and it works for one minute. During that minute, he goes to the database and checks to see if there is something that needs to be sent now.

Crontab config

Open crontab

sudo crontab -e

Add next string

* * * * * php /path/to/cron.php >> /path/to/log/file/for/debug.log 2>&1

Cron run your script every 1 minute.

Cron.php "live" 60 second cron.php:

    $now = time();
    $expectedTime = $now + 60;
    while (true) {
        Worker::run();
        if ($expectedTime < time()) {
            die(0);
        }
    }

Where Worker::run() your method, which get records from db, check timestamp and send message