How to Send 200,000 emails daily at 50,000 emails per hour

[juda]

Hi,

We have a very large list of 200,000+ subscribers which we are attempting to move from feedburner to the Feed by Email extension. We want to send them daily updates and We will like the total time it takes to send all emails to not exceed four or five hours max (or even less).

The problem now is that the email sending rate is not as fast as we will like. Right now it is going at about 10,000 to 15,000 an hour but we will like it to go at about 50,000 per hour.

We have a VPS from Hostgator with unlimited email sending so the email limits dont apply to us.

We have set:

Hourly sending = 50,000 emails per hour
PHP max execution time: 400 s
PHP memory limit: 256M
max input time: 180 s
Wordpress memory limit:256M

How can we increase the rate of sending to 50,000 per hour (or more)?

The only entry in the logs are “Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set x seconds ago” type of errors in main-xxxxx.txt

I also noticed that whenever the message above is logged, the script does not send again for another 20 or 25 minutes. Below are a few lines from the log:

01-05-2014 05:51:42 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 273 seconds ago
01-05-2014 06:11:43 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 254 seconds ago
01-05-2014 07:31:38 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 284 seconds ago
01-05-2014 07:31:39 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 285 seconds ago
01-05-2014 08:21:49 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 244 seconds ago
01-05-2014 08:46:39 – ERROR – 29.3 MB – Blocked by transient newsletter_main_engine set 285 seconds ago

[Stefano]

50000 emails per hour are 4100 email in five minutes. You need to be sure your mail service can send such an amount of emails.

Remember that even on a VPS, the mail system is configured with some “limits” to prevent the server overload. Ask the provider about such limits or better to get a look to the maillog.

[Author]

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