[pmwiki-devel] [pmwiki-users] Newsletter throttling

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 02:55:32PM -0400, The Editor wrote:
> Also, my current strategy is to just start a php process when the
> newsletter is sent that runs invisibly in the background till all the
> emails are sent, throttling it by the sleep function, and returning an
> immediate, simple message to the screen that messages have been fed to
> a queue so the admin can continue clicking around.

Before detailing with all of the other code details, let's just
look at the issue of throttling email, because that's critical
to the overall design of the module.

What value of $throttle were you planning to use for the sleep()
function, and what are the mailing constraints that you have that
are forcing the use of a throttle?

Also, the statement that "a php process runs invisibility in
the background until all the emails are sent" worries me --
what happens if that process dies in the middle for some
reason?  Do some of the email messages not get sent?
Is there a provision for restarting the send somehow?

(A process dying in the middle is always a possibility, but
it becomes much more likely if that process takes a long time 
to complete, such as would be the case if email sends are
being throttled over several hours.)

Pm