I’m new to PHP, so I need some guidance as to which would be the simplest and/or elegant solution to the following problem:
I’m working on a project which has a table with as many as 500,000 records, at user specified periods, a background task must be started which will invoke a command line application on the server that does the magic, the problem is, at each 1 minute or so, I need to check on all 500,000 records(and counting) if something needs to be done.
As the title says, it is time-critical, this means that a maximum of 1 minute delay can be allowed between the time expected by the user and the time that the task is executed, of course the less delay, the better.
Thus far, I can only think of a very dirty option, have a simple utility app that runs on the server, that at each minute, will make multiple requests to the server, example:
- check records between 1 and 100,000;
- check records between 100,000 and 200,000;
- etc. you get the point;
and the server basically starts a task for each bulk of 100,000 records or less, but it seems to me that there must be a faster approach, something similar to facebook’s notification.
Additional info:
- server is Windows 2008
- using apache + php
EDIT 1
- users have an average of 3 tasks per day at about 6-8 hours interval
- more than half of the tasks can be at least 1 time per day executed at the same time[!]
Any suggestion is highly appreciated!
I think I gave this question more than enough time, I will stick to a utility application(that sits on the server) that will make requests to a URL accessible only from the server’s IP which will spawn a new thread for each task if multiple tasks needs to be executed at the same time, it’s not really scalable but it will have to do for now.