Re: Applying the brakes

I will not repeat what all others have already told you, but I confess I am a bit puzzled about your requirement for forking or threading the preparation of these e-mails (I assume in order to increase the throughput) and at the same time having a real concern for not swamping the mail server.

Even if your mail-server can handle a few hundred messages a second it will still take many hours to process your batch of messages and it seems unlikely to me that preparing these messages by your script will take that long. Do you have any idea how long it takes to prepare your messages? As long as it is faster than the sending of the messages there is no need to complicate matters to start additional threads or use forking.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

Comment on Re: Applying the brakes

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Re^2: Applying the brakes by Ryszard (Priest) on May 09, 2008 at 07:33 UTC
The idea behind forking or threading is to offload the queue i'm processing to the mail server asap. what i want is a process that runs in as short a time as possible. for example, if someone has to kick of the notification process over the weekend, it would really suck to have to come in/log in and check it every few hours to make sure its still going. ..and yes, i'm aware of writing automated monitors and all that, but at the end of the day, nothing beats (at least initially in the first few runs) eyes-on to ensure things are going smoothly.	[reply]

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Re^2: Applying the brakes
by Ryszard (Priest) on May 09, 2008 at 07:33 UTC

for example, if someone has to kick of the notification process over the weekend, it would really suck to have to come in/log in and check it every few hours to make sure its still going.

..and yes, i'm aware of writing automated monitors and all that, but at the end of the day, nothing beats (at least initially in the first few runs) eyes-on to ensure things are going smoothly.

[reply]