detection and resolving of blocking functions ...

Hi, I originally posted this message to the php-db list, but I think that although this seems originally an oracle related problem ... there must be a "PHP solution" to it. What I'm looking for is a way to "detect" and "destroy" or "interrupt" a blocking function. Below, in the example in the original post, the OCIServerVersion function just hangs the entire application when the network connection is removed, and I find no way to overcome this. If you have any experiences regarding this kind of problems, please let me know, as this is starting te become a major blocker ;-) Thanks a lot in advance ... Christophe VG --- Hi, While writing an app that regularly checks an oracle database for new entries I run into problems when the database server suddenly goes offline (the network connection can't be trusted). The call right after such a connection loss just hangs the application. Here is a little example to illustrate ... <? ob_implicit_flush(); $cnn = OCILogon( 'scott', 'tiger' ); function valid_cnn( &$cnn ) { return ( trim( OCIServerVersion($cnn) ) != '' ); } while( true ) { print valid_cnn( $cnn ) ? "OK\n" : "DOWN\n"; sleep(1); } ?> Running it results in a nice collection of "OK"'s and a hangup when I disconnect the network. Plugging the network back in resumes the series of "OK"'s after a while ... But the desired behaviour ( "DOWN" ) won't appear. Did anyone of you encountered a similar situation ? How did you solve this ? ... Any ideas are good, since I'm a bit stuck and any lead might help to a probably very simple solution (that I just can see rigth now) Thanks in advance, Christophe VG