echo/print as code is excuted

Anon

I'm working on a mailing script which will be used to send 1000's of emails. This takes quite some time to execute, and would like to know if I can echo a variable as the code is executed?? Instead of once the script is finished processing. Thanks.

Anon

Yes, just have the echo statement inside the loop.

However, because of things like the server's output buffering, you may not see it straight away. There's the flush() statement, but see the caveats to this function in the manual.

If you're using mail() to send the emails, look around some of the code repositories (PHPBuilder, Zend, PEAR) for an SMTP class to communicate directly with the mailserver.

Anon

Thanks Grumbler, the flush function helps, but too bad about it waiting for the last </table> tag in the html in IE6. Oh well.

I am using bmatzelle's phpmailer located at sourceforge, but am using the sendmail function to send out. Would smtp be faster? Right now it sends about 150 emails per minute, seems a little slow. Server is a 1 gighz, 768, running debian/sendmail. Any advice on optimizing the sending speed?

Anon

Well, SMTP's the name of the protocol - sendmail is one implementation, kinda sitting on top if my understanding is correct. Cutting sendmail out of the process may speed things up.

Talking more than two emails per second, one bottleneck might be bandwidth.

Another thing to consider; if these emails aren't all customised in some way, you could batch them by putting lists of addresses in the bcc: field. If they are customised then one delay would probably be their generation - in that case, generate them all in advance instead and then send them all.

Just a couple of thoughts.