CRON JOB alternative

[Kudose]

Would a good alternative to a cron job to be to create a script that sets the execution limit to 10 minutes, does some emails and updates, sleeps for 5 minutes, then loops back to the beginning...?

Would that even work...would it be bad?

[Kudose]

<?php
$x=1;
while($x == 1){
	include('includes.inc.php');

set_time_limit(600); // 10 minutes

$now = date("YmdHis");
$emails = $myDb->dbFetch("SELECT * FROM ".$prefix."subscribers WHERE active='Y' AND last <= ".$now."");
$new_entries = $myDb->dbFetch("SELECT * FROM ".$prefix."inventory WHERE added >= ".$emails[0]['last']."");

if(!$new_entries){ exit; }

foreach($emails as $email){
	$body = "stuff";
	$body .= "<ul>";
	foreach($new_entries as $entry){
		$body .= '<li>stuff</li>';
	}
	$body .= "</ul>";

	$to = $email['email'];
	$subject = "New listings on ".$tb_config[0]['url'];
	$from = "FROM: ".$tb_config[0]['co_name']." No-Reply <[e-mail]>\r\nX-MSMail-Priority: High\r\nContent-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1";

	mail($to, $subject, $body, $from);

}

$myDb->dbQuery("UPDATE ".$prefix."subscribers SET last='$now'");

sleep(300); //5 minutes
}
?>

[rehfeld]

how do you start the script though?

its not going to keep starting itself

im guessing you would be using a browser to trigger the script, but then you need to keep the browser window open, and refresh the page occasionally.

if you dont want the script to stop, set the time limit to 0, and look at ignore_user_abort()

still, if the server crashes and needs to be restarted, your script isnt going to start itself back up again.

if your website gets lots of traffic, you could just use every page request to trigger a script which will check when the last time the other script was ran, and if its time for it to run again. if so, use exec() to spawn a new process in the background. if not, do nothing.

but if your website doesnt get any visitors for a while, your "cron job" wont get started. maybe thats acceptable for your situation, maybe not.

if you did something like check the last time it was ran, you will need to be careful to avoid race conditions. otherwise you could end up starting 2 or more processes if you get a few hits from visitors at the same time.

[Kudose]

Good points.

I love this forum.

🙂

[Roger_Ramjet]

And all the while it is asleep it is still occupying server resources, however small. If the process is dormant too long it might get killed anyway.