Too many hits

stevet

I have some PHP scripts that do various calls to a database etc. Some of these calls are expensive (~50ms - 100ms), but produce useful (but not essential) results.

Everything is fine provided I get less than 5 page views per second (which is most of the time).

But sometimes I get up to 20 page views per second. This causes my server to start swapping as processes pile up. Once swapping starts, it doesn't stop until the server gets a few seconds of peace and quiet, which may take a long time.

What I would like to do is to inexpensively detect the server load, and start serving reduced functionality pages if the load is high. The reduced functionality pages would execute much faster, keeping the number of active processes to a manageable number.

So is there a way to measure server load from within PHP that is inexpensive? I don't want to execute another process to find out.

Ta,

Steve

[deleted]

Don't fight your symptoms, fix the cause.

Use indexes, optimize your queries, give the database server more memory (if it starts swapping at 20 views, you have a problem)

Anon

Is your php running standalone or as a module? If it is a standalone - I think you need to have it running as a module - that'll help.

Look, dude, memory right now is solf for almost nothing. You can get 256 MB stick for 110 dollars here in the States. So why won't you go ahead an make yourself a favor and take care of that. (www.flashstocks.com or www.ebay.com).

Another thing if you run Linux box - it supports raid 0,1, and 5 at the kernel level. Go ahead and get yourself (if you can afford it) two scuzzy drives (Seagate Barracuda recommended) and set them as raid 5 or if you are risk taker set them as RAID 0. Put boot image on the regular (IDE) harddrive, so after your computer boots up it uses only scuzzies.

Another things do you run dual or single CPU box... ???

Hope that helps,