Hi, i am in the process of building a custom site in php. I am designing the user's notification settings and i am trying to decide on what options the user can check and uncheck in their settings. (please do not suggest open source software as this site needs to be custom for many reasons i have added the following setting, and i am trying to decide whether to leave it their or not: [] email me when another member comments on the same post I am aware that some posts will have 500+ individual comments so that means that if all of the users have the above option selected, the system will need to send out 500+ emails to all of the users, everytime someone adds a new comment. Would this slow down my system or is PHP well able to cope with these type of functions these days... thanks in advance for your help...
Ok, thanks for your reply... but i am asking the question in terms of system design and not user trends... as i would most definitely choose this option If i am putting the option there i need to think of the worse case scenario... and that would be that all users choose this option... and therefor would the system cope ok with it...
There are many elements that you need to think about. 1) What happens when a user comments on the post twice by mistake? Two emails or email with the latest one? 2) Maybe a timed-job, every 12 hours it will check the post and send one email with the links/description of each user's comments? 3) After each x amount of comments, an email is sent for user notification? All in all, there are many thing you need to think about when developing. As for your main question to will it slow down the machine, that is a CONDITIONAL yes. It really depends how much traffic and emails you are really on receiving/sending. From my experience, I do not think the website will slow down significantly. But sending emails and the user receiving them, that would definitely be delayed. This is what happens to popular sites when you sign-up, you await for the 'confirmation link'.
I have implemented this option in couple of websites and i do not find it performance hit for a website it self. PHP just send the mail to SMTP, POP3 or any other mailing server and then it does not care unless you implement any explicit functionality to check the delivery for email. Problem is with mailing server. Many emails queued at mailing server can be caused a delay in sending emails.