Hey guys..... I have a PHP script that I am going to be running in the background on my server; basically what it does is gets "x" amount of results from the database & then does several tasks with the data.... each row can take between about 2 - 90 seconds to process depending on some factors.

So... I was wondering, server wise, is it more beneficial to run 5 threads of this script with each run having the task of 500 rows to process or 50 threads with each run having 50 rows to process?

Why I was wondering is because I came across this quote on another forum when I was reading about background processes..

For example, your PHP script should put an entry into a database table and return right away. Then, a cron running every minute checks the queue and forks a process for each job.

The advantage here is that you don't lock an apache thread up for 10 minutes.

Thanks very much for your advice!

Why not simply put the processing work on to the database server. The process and query optimiser can probably do a far better job than you could.

I'm not quite sure what you mean? Do a better job @ what? All I'm doing with the SQL is a standard select to get the row data.... the heavy load of processing occurs on other tasks.

So why can't the SQL server do some or all of the processing?

Because last time I checked MySQL didn't do the things I'm doing with the data (taking screenshots, resizing the screenshot + a lot of other data manipulation)

Well we are a bit further forward then.

Now!
How about giving us a few more little nuggets so we KNOW what need to be "optimised"???

Well not a whole lot more to tell..

Script grabs info from the database with a rather simple query... though the tables may start to get pretty large over time.

For each record the script then goes off & takes a screenshot of of the URL it's told to, resizes the screenshot to create a couple different sized images & then deletes the original. Then it accesses some other remote data & deals with that & at the end it inputs the information gathered into the database.

And you are hoping to do that with just PHP??

I'm already doing it all....... so we don't need to worry about that.

All I really need to know is my original question.

Thank You!