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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T02:20:38+00:00

I have a PHP script that grabs data from an external service and saves

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I have a PHP script that grabs data from an external service and saves data to my database. I need this script to run once every minute for every user in the system (of which I expect to be thousands). My question is, what’s the most efficient way to run this per user, per minute? At first I thought I would have a function that grabs all the user Ids from my database, iterate over the ids and perform the task for each one, but I think that as the number of users grow, this will take longer, and no longer fall within 1 minute intervals. Perhaps I should queue the user Ids, and perform the task individually for each one? In which case, I’m actually unsure of how to proceed.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Edit

To answer Oddthinking’s question:

I would like to start the processes for each user at the same time. When the process for each user completes, I want to wait 1 minute, then begin the process again. So I suppose each process for each user should be asynchronous – the process for user 1 shouldn’t care about the process for user 2.

To answer sims’ question:

I have no control over the external service, and the users of the external service are not the same as the users in my database. I’m afraid I don’t know any other scripting languages, so I need to use PHP to do this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So, let me get this straight: You are querying an external service (what? SOAP? MYSQL?) every minute for every user in the database and storing the results in the same database. Is that correct?

    It seems like a design problem.

    If the users on the external service are the same as the users in your database, perhaps the two should be more closely configured. I don’t know if PHP is the way to go for syncing this data. If you give more detail, we could think about another solution. If you are in control of the external service, you may want to have that service dump it’s data or even write directly to the database. Some other syncing mechanism might be better.

    EDIT

    It seems that you are making an application that stores data for a user that can then be viewed chronologically. Otherwise you may as well just fetch the data when the user requests it.

    1. Fetch all the user IDs in go.

    2. Iterate over them one by one (assuming that the data being fetched is unique to each user) and (you’ll have to be creative here as PHP threads do not exist AFAIK) call a process for each request as you want them all to be executed at the same time and not delayed if one user does not return data.

    3. Said process should insert the data returned into the db as soon as it is returned.

    As for cron being right for the job: As long as you have a powerful enough server that can handle thousands of the above cron jobs running simultaneously, you should be fine.

    You could get creative with several PHP scripts. I’m not sure, but if every CLI call to PHP starts a new PHP process, then you could do it like that.

    foreach ($users as $user)
{
    shell_exec("php fetchdata.php $user");
}

    This is all very heavy and you should not expect to get it done snappy with PHP. Do some tests. Don’t take my word for it.

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