I have a PHP script that will generate a report using PHPExcel from data queried from a MySQL DB. Currently, it is linear in processing in that it gets the data back from MySQL, reads in the Excel template, writes the data to the template, then outputs it. I have optimized the code to the point that the data is only iterated over once, and there is very little processing done on the PHP side. The query returns hundreds of lines in less than .001 seconds, so it is running fast enough. After some timing I have found my bottlenecks to be (surprise, surprise) reading the template and writing the output. I would like to do this:

Spawn a thread/process to read the template
Spawn a thread/process to fetch the data
Return back to parent thread - Parent thread will wait until both are complete
Proceed on as normal

My main questions are is this possible, is it worth it? If yes to both, how would you tackle it? Also, it is PHP 5 on CentOS