Fork off grandchildren to do the mailing, and return from the CGI immediately. Give em a URL that can check up on the progress of the children if you want to get fancy. A LOT of clients will time out at two minutes, a lot of IP stacks at 2-5 minutes, apache is pretty stubborn but it too will freak after a while.

Making a CGI user wait for the status of a serious bulkmail is nuts. And worse, if they hit esc and reload to try and "get it to work" well then you had better be debouncing multiple submits or your mail users aren't going to be happy.

extremely <== has done all this wrong before =)

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

>>And worse, if they hit esc and reload to try and "get it to work"
>>well then you had better be debouncing multiple submits or
>>your mail users aren't going to be happy.


Each list made has a database with all sorts of good info in it. Its not hard to put a sending value at "1" and then only allow sending again when thats at 0. I have a pretty tech system going here, but to be honest, the worst part of it is the mailing part :)

Although I believe nows the time to get that up to speed. -justin simoni
!skazat!

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict; 
use CGI;
if(fork()) {
    my $q = new CGI;
    print $q->header();
    print $q->start_html();
    ## print your html here
    print $q->end_html;
}
else {
          close STDIN;
    open(STDOUT, ">>/tmp/yourscript.log") || die "Can't redirect stdou
+t";
    open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT") || die "Can't dup stdout";
    #you have to log warnings somewhere...
    select(STDERR); $| = 1;
    # so you can see what's appening with tail...
    select(STDOUT); $| = 1;
    #your email stuff here...
}
[download]

what does:

if(fork())

do? does this fork the process if it can?

is fork not allowed in some systems? this script is most likely going to be running on *nix, I'm very unknowing about how to make any forked processes. There are no easy to understand tutorial on it :)

would it be better to have the web-based program actually gather the information, then pipe this info to another script that only does the mailing? this seems to be a somewhat the same idea to fork() to a child process to do the dirty work. Then would that script not fall into the timeouts of the cgi program?

>>you should also close STDIN
probably a good idea!

Seems simple to just mail whoever the owner of the list is every time a batch goes out, or when the mailing is done to keep tabs.

I'm stil a bit shaky on how to do this, does anyone else have any good advice? -justin simoni
!skazat!

if(fork()) doesn't mean "if fork worked": :)))
it means if fork return a true value (the pid of the child process) then i'm the parent and i have to print my html else i'm the children (fork return 0) and i have to send the email. see "perldoc -f fork" for more info (and some hints on how andle errors)
fork is a unix system call (see fork(2)) but recent versions of perl try to implement it on windows too
for the second question: if you pipe your info to another script you have to wait for the second script to finish (unless you fork before the pipe :-)

That will work well even if 10 people send off batches at once. It all gets queued up, then the queue empties one at a time.

Why, in particular is this a CGI script?

The way I'd do it, if I had to script to send that many messages, and only had a web front end to do it from, would be to use the web system to generate the information, and write the information out to a temporary file... then have something else (perhaps in cron?) that checks for the existance of /path/to/that/file.info and starts sending the mail.

Of course, if this is on a box-not-your-own, there are security issues with this... be aware.

IANAPG, YMMV, etc

>>Why, in particular is this a CGI script? Its a web-based Mailing List Manager :)

ther main system is all web-based. I'm not geeky enough to make a terminal based, mailing list manager, nor are the people who like this script want one either,

Theres no way i'm making people set a cron tab. I for one don't know enough about cron to do this, and some servers don't permit people to do this. cron is too geeky. A big green button that says "send" is easy to understand.

-justin simoni
!skazat!