iphone & notifications : max number of notifications?

Question

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

Let me explain : I'm using a pretty simple PHP script to send the notifications (using the stream_context_create method) but some users told me they do not receive some notifications. Apparently, I may encounter some cases where I need to send up to 50,000 notifications within a minute and I think this might be the problem. I'm using one single stream to send all the notifications.

Did any of you guys encountered such an issue? Do I need to split in several streams? Is there any info about the max number of notifications I may send in a stream?

Thanks :)

Edit 1

"Speed" is not the issue here : I am able to push all my notifications to Apple within a minute (I may have some issues in the future if my number of users growns but it's OK ATM). The problem I see here is that Apple may consider me a spammer or something and does not deliver all my 50,000 notifications :/ Do you guys have any idea how I can get sure about that?

Answer 1

I asked an Apple developer representative about this and was told there were no rate limits and that the system had never dropped a 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 the code to send the notifications in C. PHP, being a scripting language, can not (probably) guarantee the required speed to handle 50K notifications per minute. Moreover, you may need a very hugely provisioned server with latest generation CPUs and a lot of memory. Indeed, to meet the QOS you require, you must be able to send about 14 notification per second. I doubt PHP is actually able to cope with this rate.

In the past I had my own provider, and my QOS was much less than the one you require. Then I decided to switch to a commercial service provider, Urban Airship. I have found this service works like a charm. None of the users have - ever - reported a missing notification. You have to pay for it, but handling this stuff by yourself may prove to be an incredible hassle.