Hello,

I am developing a small web app that will allow a small number of administrators to send company-wide SMS messages from our main phone number (I've been told this is a requirement - one number/extension) to employees. We are using this system to send reminders and emergency alerts to up to 250 employees (worst case). On average, these alerts will go to 80-150 people.

I am running into issues working around the API's SMS rate limit using PHP. I was hoping someone could shed some light on the issue and offer suggestions or a workaround. Sending 120 SMS messages would take a total of 3 minutes and PHP will time out after 30 seconds by default. I have tried extended the limits PHP puts in place, but regardless I still run into problems - and this is just not ideal to have a web page spinning for 3+ minutes. I was contemplating offloading the API calls to another server-side language/script instead of using PHP, but I am not sure the best way to go about this.

I have read this article from another forum post, which described a wait period between API calls; however, that still leaves the page spinning and I am not able to use the sleep() function on a Windows server without it counting against the timeout period - linux does not handle sleep() the same.

Any assistance or ideas would be appreciated!

Best regards,

Nick