run scripts help

[Anon]

I rent a host from an ISP.

If i want to run a particular php scripts
at a specific time, can i do that ?

For example, I got a php scripts which
will send an email to my website users
for everyday at 5 pm, is it possible ?

If now i write a message, after store into
database, it'll will automaticaly
send it to users after 2 hours, posiible ?
and how to do it ?

Another question :

If i got 10000 users for my website,
is it good to send email to them by
using php mail function (get all the email
address from database and loop the result
until the end) ???? will it affect the
server ?

Thanks for your answer. !!

[Anon]

I'd check out Perl for a task like this unless your ISP has PHP compiled as a CGI binary. Ideally you'd have a cron job execute either a PHP or Perl script that would take care of it for you but I have heard people doing things like using NT scheduler to open up a web browser from the command line that loads a PHP page that does updates for them. Ideas like these seem less than ideal but they apparently get the job done for their users.

• Jamie