question and answer, round one

[burr86]

Hello, and welcome to the first set of responses to the questions we got. We'll be splitting them all up amongst ourselves, so you'll be seeing other LJ staff members posting responses to some of your questions over the course of the next week or two. (I'll also be posting more responses later on in the week, when I get a chance to answer more

Comments

[bopeepsheep]

Re birthday notifications - why did they all have to be processed in one go every night? Midnight isn't the same time round the world. Might there not be a way of doing it for each account based on where the user is, when you have that data (and just spreading the rest out evenly over 24 hours)? i.e. do all the 'GMT+5' accounts at once, all the 'GMT+4' accounts an hour later, and so on, as each timezone approaches midnight. After all, it must have been pretty frustrating for Australians to be told about American friends' birthdays practically the following day!

[tammylc]

Yet another reason to use a client. Semagic pops up birthday reminders from your flist at midnight every night. It's great.

[bopeepsheep]

Unfortunately it crashes my laptop, which is IMO a pretty good reason not to use it. ;-)

[tammylc]

Yep, your reason trumps my reason.

[bopeepsheep]

Yes, thank you, I know that. I'm interested in the mechanics of the problem - crunching daily figures for people scattered around the globe - rather than the specific data involved.

[forecaster15]

Seems like that would work....

One problem with that might be which user's timezone are you talking about? The user with the birthday, or the friend of the user with the birthday? Since if you're running it on each person and they're friends list, they'd greatly add to the number of calculations needed. I can see it just being the time-zone of the user with the birthday, that would make sense to be told at midnight the night before in my friend's timezone so that I have 24 hours to get on and say how cool siad friend is. ;)

Another idea (which I'm sure y'all have thought of already...): can't you just make a list of all the dates in the year and then list all the users with birthdays on that day? And then all you'd have to have the script do is grab that list of users and send out an e-mail? I guess that'd still be about...(10 million divided by 365.25 =) 27,000 users per day. Yeah, I guess that's still a lot. B

ut, if you employed both ideas together, you'd only be worrying about around 1,000 an hour....