If you wanted to, you could, rather than have one script dump *EVERYTHING* to a file, you could have it just dump its PID, then communicate with it via signals.

ie: when the handler script runs, have it send the server script a SIGINT (kill("INT",$pid)) and open and write to a pipe to the server script; then have the server script, on receipt of a SIGINT, open and read from a pipe, or something like that.

it may not be pretty, but it would work well IF you know what you're doing. Of course, if you don't, then you'll end up with a mess.