PHP中的基本通知系统

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.