cron是在php中编写基于提醒的应用程序的最佳方式吗？

Question

Suppose I have a database like this.

| task                      |  time                     | 
|---------------------------|---------------------------| 
| Remind me to water plants |  2018-02-18T19:32:10.486Z | 
| English Test              |  2018-10-8T09:30:00.000Z  | 
| Math Test                 |  2018-10-8T10:30:00.000Z  | 

And I want to send a reminder notification to the user at the time it has been requested (or maybe an hour before) by the user and also execute some other block of code at that specific time when reminder notification is triggered.

I am thinking of writing a cron job something like this

* * * * * php /laravel-project/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

as mentioned in laravel documentation (https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/scheduling).

And inside that script, I will be looping onto current time reminders and reminders within next hour and perform actions.

Is it a good practice? Won't it increase traffic between PHP and database? What if i have lot of reminders within the same hour, looping into that and executing blocks of code foreach reminder will be it a good idea?

Please suggest ideas

Answer 1

Using the task scheduler is the correct way to go about this. If you have a large number of reminders to process then setting them up to execute as queued jobs is the recommended approach. That way the load on the server is minimized and does't bottleneck the system for user traffic.

You'll probably want to create a console command to handle the processing logic and create the jobs. Chunking the jobs will also be helpful, as that will stagger out the number of jobs processed in a given batch.