I have a web service written in PHP to which an iPhone app connects to. When the app calls the service, a series of notification messages are sent to Apple's APNs server so it can then send Push Notifications to other users of the app.

This process can be time consuming in some cases and my app has to wait a long time before getting a response. The response is totally independent of the result of the notification messages being sent to the APNs server. 

Therefore, I would like the web service to send the response back to the app regardless of whether the messages to APNs have been sent.

I tried using pcntl\_fork to solve the problem:

```
<?php
...
$pid = pcntl_fork();
if($pid == -1) 
{
    // Could not fork (send response anyway)
    echo "response";
} 
else if($pid) 
{
    // Parent process - send response to app
    echo "response";
} 
else 
{
    // Child process - send messages to APNs then die
    sendMessageAPNs($token_array);
    die();
}
?> // end of script

```

Unfortunately, the parent process seems to wait for the child process to end before sending the response even though I do not use pcntl\_wait in the parent process. Am I doing something wrong or is this normal behaviour? If this is normal then is there another way I can solve this problem?

Thank you!