Mailing List Send Trouble

[earthlingzed]

I have built a little tool that will send a rich email to all of my customers on my mailing list. The script connects to a database and grabs all of the email addresses then runs a simple loop to send an email.

The script times out when I try to send everyone an email so I added a flag in my .htaccess file that allows scripts a longer time to process (php_value max_execution_time 300). This still seems less than optimal, though.

What is the best way to handle this sort of long repetitive process in a script without timing out or over taxing the server? Do people use some sort of Cron job and have it execute over time or is there a less complicated approach?

I appreciate any advice anyone might have.

[sarahk]

You may find the idea of theads interesting: see http://sarah.users.phpclasses.org/browse/package/1136.html

but the most common method is to work out how many are "guaranteed" and to do a header() or meta refresh to start the script over. Use a database to record which are done, which aren't.

Also, look at the opportunities for optimisation to prevent the timeout. Any performance issues in your script etc?