PHP Mail Support

[restrive]

I have a website that was previously hosted on a standard Apache/PHP Debian server.

The website was recently moved over to our new CPanel server.

Everything works fine except when we do a mailshot we send out about 6000 email rapidly using a PHP script, the page that loads times out and the process crashes. It used to wait until the mails were all sent out, but now the pages "crashes" without any set reason. It about every 100th email but that and the time is different every time.

The maximum each domain can send out per hour is set to 0 (unlimited)

From the logs we have found this:
[error] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1572864) (tried to allocate 532481 bytes)
The server however has more than enough available RAM

[NogDog]

If the script uses PHP's built-in mail() function, it is not very efficient for this sort of mass mailing (as you have discovered). The quick "fix" would be to throw in an [man]ini_set/man on the memory_limit setting. Probably a better fix would be to use an alternative mailing method. As described on the mail() page:

Note: It is worth noting that the mail() function is not suitable for larger volumes of email in a loop. This function opens and closes an SMTP socket for each email, which is not very efficient.

For the sending of large amounts of email, see the » PEAR::Mail, and » PEAR::Mail_Queue packages.