Max execution time when running a cron

fastsol · February 11, 2014

I want to run a cron job that will be sending out up to 100 or so emails at one time based on info gathered from the database. I am wondering if I will need to ini_set a higher script execution time limit to make sure all the emails are sent.

jazzman1 · February 11, 2014

Depends of your hosting provider. 100 emails at one time is not good idea.

mac_gyver · February 11, 2014

how long does your script take to run, using microtime(true) at the start and end and calculating the difference?

fastsol · February 11, 2014

I have a fully dedicated server that I run the site from running WHM and cPanel. So I could probably modify whatever to make this work, but I haven't ever tried to run a script with that much processing before.

kicken · February 11, 2014

You can completely disable the timelimit by calling set_time_limit(0).

Rather than disable it, some recommend you just pick something reasonable and refresh it in a loop. Calling set_time_limit restarts the timer at zero so if you wrote something like this:

while (true){
  set_time_limit(5);
  doSomething();
}

so long as doSomething() executed in less than 5 seconds the script would run indefinitely. Only if something caused it to run longer would the script be killed.

fastsol · February 11, 2014

After thinking about it some more, I think I will que the emails in the db and then run the send script a few times during the day in smaller amounts of emails to send. What's it matter how often it runs anyway since the cron is doing it for me.

jazzman1 · February 12, 2014

What about this?

For the test, I'm going to use sakila database with customer table with 599 fake emails, and swiftmailer as default php mail library.

So, to retrieve, sorting and send all e-mails I've written the following:

e_list.php

<?php 
  
  $username = 'lxc';

  $password = 'password';

  $dbh = new PDO('mysql:dbname=sakila;host=::1;charset=utf8', $username, $password);
  
$dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
  
$stmt = $dbh->prepare("SELECT email, CONCAT( first_name,' ',last_name) as names FROM sakila.customer WHERE 1");

$stmt->execute();

$cust_info = array();

$count_rows = $stmt->rowCount(); 

$part = floor($count_rows / 10); 

while ($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
    $cust_info[$row['email']] = $row['names'];
}

function partition( $list, $p ) {
    $listlen = count( $list);
    $partlen = floor( $listlen / $p );
    $partrem = $listlen % $p;
    $partition = array();
    $mark = 0;
    for ($px = 0; $px < $p; $px++) {
        $incr = ($px < $partrem) ? $partlen + 1 : $partlen;
        $partition[$px]= array_slice($list, $mark, $incr);
        $mark += $incr;
    }
    return $partition;
}

$stmt = null;

// sort emails
$p = partition($cust_info,$part); 

// restart the indexes of the array starting from 1
$emails = array_combine(range(1, count($p)), array_values($p));

Result of the sorting:

sendMail.php

<?php

require_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/Swift-5.0.3/lib/swift_required.php';

require_once 'e_list.php';

date_default_timezone_set('America/Toronto');

$transport = Swift_SmtpTransport::newInstance();

// Create the Mailer using your created Transport
$mailer = Swift_Mailer::newInstance($transport);

$subject = 'Some subject content';

$body = "<!DOCTYPE html>
 <html>
  <body>
  <p>Some content here.....</p>
  </body>
</html>"; // that's your html content

$message = Swift_Message::newInstance()
        ->setContentType("text/html")
        ->setMaxLineLength(100)
        ->setSubject($subject)
        ->setFrom(array("centos-box@localdomain" => "jazzman"))
        ->setBody($body);
 
// delay the time
$delay = 10000000; // 10 sec
//
// iteration 
$it = count($emails);

$time_start = microtime(true);

while ($it > 0) {

    $message->setTo($emails[$it]);

    usleep($delay);

    $mailer->send($message);
    
    $it--;
}

$time_end = microtime(true);

$time = $time_end - $time_start;

printf("Sent %d messages\n", $count_rows);

echo '<br />'; 

printf("Emails were sent in %d seconds\n", $time);

// don't forget to re-write this script to return an exit() command
// avoiding multiple boots by cron job

// file_put_contents(__FILE__, "<?php exit();");

Result:

Sent 599 messages
Emails were sent in 593 seconds

Edited February 12, 2014 by jazzman1

trq · February 12, 2014

Swiftmailer already has the ability to spool mails ready to be send at a later time built in. Take a look at the SpoolTransport or role your own simple DatabaseSpool.

fastsol · February 12, 2014

Thanks for all the input and examples. I have implemented a db que system to gather the list of people to email. Then another script that sends the emails in chunks of 20 per day, which is all I really need after narrowing down how and what I am actually trying to achieve.

Thanks again, JD

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Max execution time when running a cron

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