A few important things to note for anyone using this in conjunction with signal handlers:
If anyone is trying to optionally use either pcntl_async_signals() when available (PHP >= 7.1) or ticks for older versions, this is not possible...at least not in a way that does NOT enable ticks for newer PHP versions. This is because there is simply no way to conditionally declare ticks. For example, the following will "work" but not in the way you might expect:
<?php
if (function_exists('pcntl_async_signals')) {
pcntl_async_signals(true);
} else {
declare(ticks=1);
}
?>
While signal handlers will work with this for old and new version, ticks WILL be enabled even in the case where pcntl_async_signals exists, simply because the declare statement exists. So the above is functionally equivalent to:
<?php
if (function_exists('pcntl_async_signals')) pcntl_async_signals(true);
declare(ticks=1);
?>
Another thing to be aware of is that the scoping of this declaration changed a bit from PHP 5.6 to 7.x...actually it was corrected apparently as noted here:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.register-tick-function.php#121204
This can cause some very confusing behavior. One example is with the pear/System_Daemon module. With PHP 5.6 that will work with a SIGTERM handler even if the script using it doesn't itself use declare(ticks=1), but does not work in PHP 7 unless the script itself has the declaration. Not only does the handler not get called, but the signal does nothing at all, and the script doesn't exit.
A side note regarding ticks that's annoyed me for some time: As if there wasn't enough confusion around all this, the Internet is full of false rumors that ticks were deprecated and are being removed, and I believe they all started here:
http://www.hackingwithphp.com/4/21/0/the-declare-function-and-ticks
Despite a very obscure author's note at the very end of the page saying he got that wrong (that even I just noticed), the first very prominent sentence of the article still says this, and that page is near the top of any Google search.