CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqlnotificationssocial-networking
Alex
Alex

Reputation: 5636

Basic Notification System in PHP

I have a small scale PHP social network, running with a MySQL database. Users on the network can join various groups and receive updates.

I want to notify the user when a new update has been released by a group.

I don't want to do anything fancy with sockets, I'd just like a display of how many updates have been posted since the user was last active.

I'd thought of recording the current time against a user every time they refresh the page, this way I can compare the date of updates vs. the last time a user was active.

I'm not sure that writing to the database on every page load is a good idea though. Any other suitable suggestions?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1545

Answers (2)

Evert
Evert

Reputation: 99523

Your solution is fine. Make sure you index the correct fields in your database.

Now if you ever have a question like this again.. go through the following steps:

  • Try it
  • Measure

If you're worried about scalability problems down the road.. do the same thing again, except you measure with how many records you expect (or want to support). It will be easy to just generate 10.000 records or even millions and try again.

Now if you actually run into unacceptable speeds, write down your problem and ask again here how you could potentially optimize.

Upvotes: 1

Ynhockey
Ynhockey

Reputation: 3932

I think the best way to do this is indeed writing to the database. However, in terms of performance there are a few ways to make it faster. Two ways I can think of are caching the updates for popular groups and creating a table which will only have users and timestamps, both indexed, so that should work very quickly.

Upvotes: 1

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