Re: Cron php & refresh

Jeffrey wrote: > Per Jessen wrote: >> Jeffrey wrote: >> >>> I'm working on an application that includes e-mail notifications of >>> certain events. Because the application will have hundreds or >>> thousands of users, I've designed it so that e-mail notifications >>> are saved to a MySQL table. Then a regular cron job runs a php page >>> to select the data from the table, put it into a mail() command and >>> mail. >> >> Why not just send the notification at the time of the event? (I >> assume you update the database at the time of the event). >> >> >> /Per Jessen, Zürich >> >> > Because in my experience, several hundred e-mails takes time to send, > hence either the user leaves the page before all the mails are sent or > the page times out before all mails are sent. And if there are > thousands of e-mails, it will only get worse. Sorry, I (wrongly) assumed 1 event = 1 email. OK, then I'd stick to what you're doing - add the event to a queue (i.e.. your database), and poll this at regular intervals. I don't think you need to worry about the number of emails sent per interval. Just let your PHP script generate the sendmail commands and the email-text to stdout, then pipe that to /bin/sh. The output generated by your script would look like this: sendmail -oi -r <fromaddr> <toaddr> ..... <<XXX emailhdr emailhdr emailtxt emailtxt emailtxt XXX sendmail -oi -r <fromaddr> <toaddr> ..... <<XXX etc etc /Per Jessen, Zürich