Mass Mailer - Sleep or count...?

[Harlequin]

Hi

 

I have a system where users can invite up to 250 people to attend an event. The problem is that I do not want to send 250 mails all at the same time so I used a script that does the following:

// Send Mail:
	$i = 0;
	while ($i <= $Number) {

And then sends the mail until the number reaches 250.

 

I added a sleep if the number reached "X" or "Y" but that simply held up the page and returned an error so I am thinking that perhaps instead of sending the mail immediately I push them into a database and then run a CRON job every few seconds to send a bunch of the mails.

Suggestions...?

[fastsol]

CRON is for sure the way to go on this.

[Harlequin]

It's what I was thinking because I could easily have 5 or even 10 users all sending 250 invites simultaneously and I'd simply get my account shut down I think.

[The Letter E]

You should consider a language that is better for high concurrency. With node.js you could process a large amount of the requests asynchronously as apposed to the synchronous downside of php.

 

You may also find a service like IronMQ or RabbitMQ useful once you need to scale beyond your current means.