Using the PHP Function Curl_Easy_Pause

A php function is a set of instructions that can be called at any time. It is declared by putting the keyword function followed by its name and the open curly braces for the code block inside. Using a function in a php script allows developers to reuse the same code for multiple tasks. This makes the function easier to maintain and read.

In PHP, the return statement is used to return the final output of a function. It is an important part of the function declaration. Functions can only be exited once the return statement is executed. To use the return statement, you must have a valid argument to return. You can also use it with other functions in your PHP code to return their values.

Using the return statement in your PHP code will allow you to control the execution of the function and pause or sleep it at any time. For example, you may want to pause a cURL download when you are waiting for an update from the web server or if you want to stop your PHP script from running too fast and overwhelming CPU resources.

One of the easiest ways to pause a cURL session is to use the curl_easy_pause function. You can also pause a cURL session by letting the read or write callback return the proper magic return code from the libcurl library itself. When the connection is paused, libcurl will often end up buffering the data because it already announced an uncompressed window size to the server and can't deliver any more data until the reading or writing callback returns the magic return value that signals that the transfer should be unpaused again.