Okay, that's fine, except all the example code I can find only shows me how to do this when the file is retrieved from fopen () - ugh!<BR><BR>So, in short, does anyone know how to write a PHP ...

Yes, having a PHP script persist for each client is not very scalable. It gets worse if those scripts may hang indefinitely because of a message queue read that won’t timeout.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to setup Nginx with PHP support. The key? The installation of fastCGI, aka PHP-FPM, so Nginx can serve PHP files to clients.