Creating a PHP "Loading" Bar

[Nick_Lee]

Hi Everyone,

I am currently developing an application that administers and allows administrators to send to a mailing list.
The list is about 1000 members long and when a message is composed, the database of members is queried and their email addresses, along with the message itself, is passed to mail() to be sent.

The problem is the "successful" page can take up to a minute to a minute and ahalf to load, presumably due to the volume of email addresses being sent out to.

So what I'd like to do is to create a "progress" bar, a percentage indicator, of how much of the email is sent.

Is there an easy way to do this?
I mean it occured to me one easy way would be simply to LIMIT the MySQL queries to 100 each time, and do a 100-person query, send, then load a new page with GET with the next 100, until the cycle is complete. But that seems a bit clunky.
Is there a better way and is there any outofthebox code out there to do it for me?

Cheers

Nick.

[AstroTeg]

I've discovered it might be better to run code to email 1000 people in the background. Since it takes a while to process, why have your users wait for 1000 to be sent out? Just start up a background process (check out [man]popen[/man] and [man]pclose[/man]) which runs your email code and then present the user with a screen letting them know they've started the emailing process.

From the user's perspective, they click and they're done (no waiting). And this is usually a good thing.

Otherwise, if you still want to do the progress bar, you'd have to get into using JavaScript.

[Nick_Lee]

That seems like a good idea -- it's not something I've ever used before but I shall see if I can get my head round it.

Cheers

Nick.

[Installer]

As for speeding up the mailing process, you might want to check out the socket-based function here. There's also a short explanation of why using mail() can be slow.

(Second paragraph: nm)