RE: [PHP] Can PHP do this?

First, you dont store this forever. You store only the results for the last <X> messages. Second, you use ranges. Per SQL-Row have the possibility to set values for a whole range of articles. This would be an all-int table. Very fast and very small if properly indexed. (Something like 10 to 20 bytes per entry, times a million rows is still only 20Mb) And you store only something if the user read it, so that would be ( #read articles where article in last <X> articles per user). Last, you could cache some of the results in RAM. (I'm doing something like that now, although I dont use PHP for this particular project.) > > At 01:42 PM 1/9/2001 +0100, Sander Pilon wrote: > >Per user, just store in a table which messages he read or not. > > Wouldn't that turn into a huge bloated (slow) table of 10,000 some odd > messages times however many users you have? > > -Ed >