SLEEP + Header problem

dcav

Hi all,

I am having this problem for the longest time. Hope you guys can solve it.

I'm running a community website where I send out weekly newsletters to all of my clients. However, I'm sure my hosting provider wouldn't be so happy if I just FOR LOOP and send it all out at once. SO what I did was I just a SLEEP and a header mthod that triggers after every second, where the header sends out GET variables for the next iteration to fetch at which account I am currently at to send the next newsletter.

Now the problem is this, I have about 250 people to send it to, since I set it to 1 second per newsletter sent, it would take 250 seconds for the page to finish loading. For some reason, my Firefox gives me a error after 19 newsletters have been sent out, saying that they detected a script that wouldn't be able to redirect anymore. I'm sure that they were thinking that they detected an infinite loop (which it wasn't).

So is there any better solution or a fix to my problem?
THANKS ALOT

$sleepTime = 1;

$dSendList =& $db->getAll( "SELECT DISTINCT id_account FROM subscription ORDER BY id_account" );
$countList = count($dSendList);
$expDuration = $countList * $sleepTime;

if (($_GET["action"] == "send") && ($_GET["nTimes"] < $countList - 1)) {
	$nTimes = $_GET["nTimes"];
	$Ruserid = $dSendList[$nTimes][id_account];
	include_once "incrementNext.php"; // This includes the next URL
	include_once 'send_events_emails.php';  // Script to generate newsletters

	sleep($sleepTime);
	header("Location: " . $urlLocation); /* Redirect browser */
	exit;
	}

_theworks

You mite need to adjust these lines in your php.ini

* memory_limit
* max_execution_time
* post_max_size

dcav

I do not have access to php.ini

however, that's beside the point. This only occurs "client side" when I'm using Firefox (since I think that Firefox determined it as an infinite loop), not IE. I fixed the script for IE by shorten 1 second to 0.1 second using usleep().

Anyway, how do people implement this function usually? I mean, delaying a function. And no, I don't have access to Crontab.

_theworks

Yes, But this sounds like the servers timing out. so im not really sure if its firefox's problem. although firefox could just be saying this is taking to long to load 'time out!' so what exactly is your problem? is it that ur script seems to run in ie but not ff? (this doesnt seem likely as a HTTP client should'nt affect a script which is running server-side should it?) are you using usleep inside a 250 times forloop?
if so thats prolly why its timing out.

_theworks

dcav wrote:
however, that's beside the point. This only occurs "client side" when I'm using Firefox (since I think that Firefox determined it as an infinite loop), not IE. I fixed the script for IE by shorten 1 second to 0.1 second using usleep().

ok i mite be wrong here but im sure firefox nor MSIE can tell you jack sh*t about loops running on a server-side script.

and php has max_execution time set to 30 seconds by default doesnt it? so theres no way a 250 second exectution is going to take place unless it was tweaked prior ..

Weedpacket

saying that they detected a script that wouldn't be able to redirect anymore

That's because while the browser was running it was getting "Location:" header after "Location:" header after "Location:" header - which is never a good thing for a browser to find itself getting (250 redirects at a rate of one a second would have the user sitting staring at a blank screen for near on five minutes. No sensibly written site would do that to a user deliberately - it looks too much like a denial of service attack).

You need to rethink your whole method here. Get in touch with your hosting provider and see if they really would be upset about you sending 250 mails at once (look around for SMTP classes written in PHP to make the job much more efficient).

Or put the thing in a loop, using [man]set_time_limit[/man] (put it inside the loop and set it to two or three seconds, which should be plenty) and just echo some sort of progress indicator to the browser instead of a redirection response (something like "5 emails sent..... 6 emails sent....." for the user to look at for the next five minutes).