I’d definitely like to hear about what workarounds you’ve discovered, and if you manage to get anywhere with a C solution I’d love to hear about that too. :) What I’ve been doing instead is using gearman and submitting asynchronous jobs to it for processing before returning. I have the gearman server running on localhost, so it adds almost no delay to the whole process, but it definitely results in more moving parts that can break, so it’s not an ideal solution.

I’ve figured out how to execute queries within the apache process space after the connection closes, but PHP is no dice. Additionally, it’s fairly clear to me that mysqli destroys itself too early to be useful as well.

I found your question on Stack Overflow and I’m annoyed by the same thing. apache_close() should exist. I’m tempted to write it and dust off some C skills.

If you issue a query asyncronously beforehand, PHP will block after closing with apache until the query completes. That’s the best I can do . . . but it helps.

If you want to know what workarounds I’ve discovered, shoot me a response.