If you want to run the script through the web, you can set_time_limit(0) to prevent your script from timing out and register_shutdown_function() to ensure that your script continues running even if the user terminates the connection from the browser. Because of this, though, you will also need a mechanism that makes it possible for the script to determine whether there is another instance of the script running, so that you can prevent an overanxious usre from refreshing your script multiple times because he can't tell that it's still sending out mail and hit your mailing list more than once.
Finally, you will need a fast mailing mechanism. mail() is not your only option--you can interface directly with any mailer through SMTP or pipes, for example--but in my experience, you don't need to go any further to make things work properly. What you really need, is a fast MTA that is capable of queueing your messages and deliverying them efficiently, like qmail. If you want an easier way of composing e-mail programmatically, you may want to take a look at PHPMailer (http://phpmailer.sourceforge.net/), which can simplify things significantly and can also interface directly with a fast MTA like qmail.
We use a combination of these techniques to send out tens of thousands of notifications once every month, and never had a problem with it.
HTH,
Marco Tabini
-- php|architect The PHP Magazine for PHP Professionals http://www.phparch.com
Tumurbaatar S. wrote:
The scenario is:
1. Site administrator logs into his admin page and writes some message on a form. 2. After clicking submit the web script should broadcast this message to several hundred subscribers.
And I'm wonder how to implement this on PHP.
Sending an email to each subscribers can take
a much time and PHP will stop after max_execution_time.
Any ideas?
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