Decreasing mail() processing time..

Anon

Hello, I am working on a newsletter program that will mail approximately 5000 recipients (and get larger over time). Our application is based on Apache, PHP3, MySQL, RH6.2 Linux, and Qmail.

I am looking to find a good way to decrease the amount of time it takes the program to mail the recipients.

Currently, the newsletter editor creates the newletter via a form and then submits it. The PHP3 application then proceeds to pull the users out of the MySQL database and mail each one via mail().

Here are the timings I currently have:

20 mails: 2 seconds
200 mails: 25-30 seconds
2000 mails: 3:30-3:50 minutes

I would like to decrease this as the active user may receive a time-out error from their browser. I tried replacing the default /usr/local/php3.ini sendmail_path, which is blank, to:

sendmail_path = /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject

but did not see any real change in processing time. Any suggestions?

I have considered changing this from a real-time system to a batch system, but can't figure out how to automatically change the headers in a mail message outside of PHP's mail() function. (How can I do this using /usr/sbin/sendmail or /var/qmail/bin/qmail-inject?)

I am sure this has been done before, so any help or suggestions would be appreciated!

Regards, Dustin

Anon

what i do is have a front end php page that lets the user begin the mailing and get the status from the server. when the user begins the mailing it calls an external script that actually sends the mail and doesn't tie up the current script. the users is notified right away that the process is started. no point in having the user wait as mail() doesn't return an error.

call the external script like this: exec("/usr/local/bin/php script_location > /dev/null 2>&1 &", $returned_error);

just have a loop getting one email to be sent from the database, create it, and record any errors to a log table. i throttle my script to send about 1 email a second to keep the system responsive and not overwhelm the internet connection as its not a dedicated email server. this also means i can have the php page that the user sees update every so often and see somewhat accurately how long till its finished. just a bit more user friendly imho, but other ppl certainly have their favorite ways of doing this.