Process getting stuck because of a full STDOUT/STDERR pipe

[Anaël Ollier]

This is not a bug, only a little help that might be useful for some people passing through here.

It might be worth noting a scenario I've just encountered: I'm running a ffmpeg command with amphp/process and I was only interested in what was produced by STDOUT (wav audio).

So basically it was as simple as:

$command = sprintf('ffmpeg -i %s -f wav -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le -ar 16000 pipe:1', escapeshellarg($filePath));
$process = Process::start($command);
while (($chunk = $process->getStdout()->read()) !== null) {
    // ... do stuff
}
$process->join();

But I noticed that for some reason, the process got eventually stuck on the read() and could go no further.
After digging for a while, and remembering a similar situation using the native proc_open() with $pipes, I understood that it was not because I didn't care about STDERR in my case, that the corresponding pipe was not filling up anyway! Until it was completely full and the process got stuck, waiting for the pipe to be read/emptied.

In this precise case, the optimal solution is not to fill STDERR in the first place, using the options -hide_banner -loglevel quiet for ffmpeg, but if you cannot control the command's output, I suppose you can use this:

async(
    ByteStream\pipe(...),
    $process->getStderr(),
    new WritableResourceStream(\fopen('/dev/null', 'wb'))
)->ignore();

Feel free to correct me. I did not test this solution myself but I thought it was important to mention.