Comment by Mark on "I'm thinking cronjob, but it can't work. How to alert a user every day (based on a condition)?"

I don't think you need a scheduled job for this. You can just handle the points whenever users complete the order.

Simply take the completion date (so if you do it during ordering, that's the current date), and compare it to the date the order was started.

EDIT Just noticed the daily alerts in the title. You can run a background job using cron or something like it. Cron just triggers your application, which does all the logic, i.e. it queries for outstanding orders from the last week. In that case, scheduled jobs are the right solution.

I see your point, but wouldn't this cost a lot of resources? I'd still have to run a cronjob every 23 hours or so, even if I have no orders (or worse yet, no users) for the past week. There are a few other cronjobs running already, some that run every 5 minutes. Won't it be overburdening the database and/or website?

Lila Fowler If you have no orders, the only thing you need to do is check for orders. That can probably be done in a single SQL query taking no more than 5 seconds.

If you actually have orders (and I hope you do), it might take a bit more. But you're already doing a bunch of requests per order, so adding one more operation is not going to double your server load.

If you have lots of orders, you might want to spread them out a bit, handling a few every 10 minutes instead of hundreds at midnight. If you reach thousands of orders per day, maybe you do need an extra server. But at that point, you can probably afford it.

Good point :) So cronjob it is, then.

Thank you guys so much for the help as always!

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