time before re-run

[hisham]

How to make a php code is capable of waiting for a given number of seconds before re-run again?
Thanks in Advance.

 

[jpadie]

php is not the right tool for this. a cron job that runs a php script would be better.

but perhaps something like this would kind of work

$delay = 10; //seconds
$timeout = 30;//timeout in seconds
$function = 'functionName';//name of function
$force = true;
while ($force){
 set_time_limit ($timeout); //reset the timeout counter
 sleep ($delay); // wait a while
 $function(); // run the function
}

make sure that $timeout > $delay
and also bear in mind that this script is going to be very difficult to cancel once it starts. you'll have to kill the php process. or perhaps add a filesystem check into the loop so that you can at least create a kill file if needs be.

 

[hisham]

You are right jpadie,
but I need to send email to my 1500 newsletter subscribers, my code must loop and retrieve the email addresses form the database and send first 100, then the code must stop for 5 seconds and retrieve the next 100 etc ... , to give the SMTP server a considerable chance to flush some memory.
any idea?

 

[jpadie]

use a mailing list manager then - there are loads of freee/shareware versions out there. or use phpmailer with its own smtp class.

my method may work above but it would be as easy to increment a counter once per loop and then add a test in there:

if ($counter == 50){
 set_time_limit(120);
 sleep(30);
 $counter = 0;
} else {
 $counter ++;
}

just insert the code in your sending loop.