Iphone & notifications: maximum number of notifications?

Question

I have an iPhone app sending notifications and everything works fine ... Except sometimes :)

Let me explain: I use a fairly simple PHP script to send notifications (using the stream_context_create method), but some users told me that they are not receiving some notifications. Apparently, I might run into some cases where I need to send up to 50,000 notifications in a minute, and I think this might be a problem. I use one thread to send all notifications.

Have any of you guys encountered such a problem? Do I need to share multiple threads? Is there any information about the maximum number of notifications that I can send in a stream?

Thanks:)

Change 1

“Speed” is not a problem here: I can push all my notifications to Apple in a minute (maybe I may have problems in the future if my user number grows, but it's OK ATM). The problem that I see here is that Apple can consider me a spammer or something else, and does not send all my 50,000 notifications: / You guys have ideas, how can I make sure of this?

Answer 1

I asked an Apple developer representative about this and said that there were no speed limits and that the system never dropped the notification.

(This was 12 months ago when Push was still relatively new, so they may have changed policies since then)

Answer 2

I would rather develop a code for sending notifications in C. PHP, which is a scripting language, cannot (possibly) guarantee the required processing speed of 50 thousand notifications per minute. In addition, you may need a very powerful server with the latest generation processors and large memory. Indeed, in order to satisfy the required QOS, you should be able to send about 14 notifications per second. I doubt that PHP is really capable of handling this speed.

In the past, I had my own provider, and my QOS was much less than the one you need. Then I decided to switch to a commercial service provider, Urban Airship. I found this service works like a charm. None of the users have ever reported a missing notification. You have to pay for it, but the processing of this material in itself can be an incredible problem.

Answer 3

If a failure occurs in the notification stream (i.e., a bad token), then several tokens that continue it are skipped. It was my experience, so I send one token at a time. No more crashes except one bad token.

Answer 4

I ran into the same problem, but with much less clicks on the stream. In my case, I clicked all my messages, about 250, in the same thread, and no one will be delivered. It seems like a bad token seems to cause a crash, but so far I'm not sure what constitutes a bad token.

I read elsewhere that pushing messages using distribution tokens in a sandbox environment and clicking messages using tokens in a distribution environment could cause the stream to crash, but I mixed tokens in both environments and did not miss messages, but I only pushed a few messages in one thread at a time.

In short: I push one message per thread and it works great. It takes about seconds to click 250 posts, which seems terribly inefficient, but this is just a minor nuisance for me.