Question

I’ve a script to send packages of 300-500 e-mails hour. That means that this script will be fired once a hour using cron or other feature.

The server has a max execution limit of 30secs and it’s not configurable.

I’ve been thinking if the pseudo-code below should work:

$time=time();
$count=0;
while(condition){
    $count++;
    send(email);
    $now=time();
    if($now-$time>=29){break;} //1sec margin
}
echo "$count e-mails sent";

Opinions?

Answer 1

Just to double-check that you can’t set the execution time, here are two suggestions.

---

You could simply call set_time_limit() before sending an e-mail. According to the PHP docs:

When called, set_time_limit() restarts the timeout counter from zero. In other words, if the timeout is the default 30 seconds, and 25 seconds into script execution a call such as set_time_limit(20) is made, the script will run for a total of 45 seconds before timing out.

For instance:

foreach ($emails as $email) {
    set_time_limit(30);
    send($email, ...);
}

---

Another option is via the cron. Since you are running PHP from a cron job, you can specify your own php.ini. You could execute your script as follows:

php -c /custom/directory/my_php.ini my_script.php

Where my_php.ini may specify:

max_execution_time = 0     ; (unlimited)