At the start of June, I began collecting email newsletters together to collect information from them. My main interest was in finding answers such as the most common day and time for sending email newsletters, how many links and images do businesses include in their newsletters?

So far, I have collected over 300 emails newsletters from over 50 sources with an average of 9 new email newsletters coming in per day. A summary of all the information collected is on the email newsletter information page.

At first, I wrote a simple PHP script to gather together the information and show it on the page. After receiving a few dozen large newsletters the script began timing out as it took too long for the information to be worked out and displayed. I rewrote the system for collecting the newsletter information and displaying it using CodeIgniter, a PHP framework using the MVC approach.

I used CodeIgniters Active Record class in a Model to retrieve and calculate the summary information to display in a View. Its performance is amazing, the same information that originally took too long to display, resulting in a time-out now displays in a second or more, without Caching. CodeIgniter has fantastic performance.

If you are developing any apps using PHP, I highly recommend taking a look at CodeIgniter, there is a fantastic User guide, Wiki and forum.