Re: Individual bulk e-mails - performance question

Hello,

on 08/30/2008 02:40 PM Merlin said the following:
I am running a travel community where users want to get informed on changes inside different groups they have subscribed to.

At the moment I am doing this with a for loop that generates an individual e-mail sent to them via phpmailer. That works, however the submit of the content upload form (that triggers the e-mail notification) now takes several seconds, as more and more users subscribe.

I am thinking about placing the info on the individual e-mail inside a ascii txt file that will be read by a cron job which will send the e-mail instead. Something like every 5 minutes reading it line by line and then after sending it removing the line.
e.g:
for:bla@xxxxxxx; body:individual
for:new@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; body:other email

Does this sound like a plan? Or do you believe that there are better ways doing it? I could imagine that I would run into problems a few months from now if for example the cron job will be triggered a second time, while the first one has not finished.

Any ideas or suggestions? Thank you for any help.

While it is a good idea to off-load e-mail delivery to a script run from cron, it seems odd that each mail takes several seconds to deliver.

I suspect that you sending messages in a less efficient way. Maybe you are queueing messages using SMTP (which is the slowest way to queue messages) or you are using sendmail on your system and it is configured by default to attempt to deliver the messages immediately, making your PHP script hang while the message is not accepted by the remote server.

There are much better ways to do it by just telling the mail system to queue the messages without holding on the PHP script.

On the other hand, if the time it takes build your messages but the messages have the same contents for all the receipients, you can also use some good e-mail components with caching support.

In that case, I recommend that you use for instance this MIME message class that provides message body caching support, so you can send messages to different receipients and cache the building of message body parts and avoid overhead when sending to a new receipient.

It also provides different means to send messages and solve the overhead of message delivery by forcing the messages to queue by your local and be delivered later whenever possible, so your PHP script is freed to send messages to other recipients.


http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage


--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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