Forum loads very slow when mails have to be sent

[WinFuture]

We have our own SMTP-Mailserver and it is not very fast. So, when am member registers or a post is written, where a notification-mail has to be sent, it takes a lot of seconds to load the next page. Is there a way to send the mails "in the background", so that the forum can go on with the redirect to the next page?

[RobertMidd]

We have our own SMTP-Mailserver and it is not very fast. So, when am member registers or a post is written, where a notification-mail has to be sent, it takes a lot of seconds to load the next page. Is there a way to send the mails "in the background", so that the forum can go on with the redirect to the next page?

Have you tried changing the email settings in the ACP to use php mail() and not SMTP.

[WinFuture]

We have not installed any mail server on that server, but we consider installing postfix and use phpmail, if we don't find any better solution. At the moment, phpmail does not work.

[Labonte18]

That's likely the majority of the problem. It's having to connect to the external mailserver to send the mail, and that connection time is what is slowing it down. Installing even a simple, locked SMTP client on the box would likely speed it up.

The problem is that you cannot have tasks run "in the background" with PHP. PHP is run on demand, because there are relatively few hosts who will allow you to install TSR or similar programs on their server. Tasks may run transparently, but 'in the background' really isn't possible. And, there's a whole lot of semantics involved here with the definition of "in the background"

[WinFuture]

Thanks for the answer. We now optimized the Configuration of the SMTP-Server and now almost all posts take less than 2 seconds. This is ok.