Displaying server load

[ForeverBlue]

Would appreciate any help in getting this to work.
I'm using Apache 1.3, php 4.3 and mysql 4.0 The
code was originally written for a linux setup and
displays server load on the index page.

Can it be altered to work on a windows XP based system 😕

<? $percent = min(100, round(exec('ps ax | grep -c apache') / 256 * 100));
if ($percent <= 70) $pic = "loadbargreen.gif";
elseif ($percent <= 90) $pic = "loadbaryellow.gif";
else $pic = "loadbarred.gif";
$width = $percent * 4;
print("<img height=15 width=$width src=\"/pic/$pic\" alt='$percent%'>"); ?>

Thanks in advance for any help 🙂
I've managed to fix everything else but this is stumping me totally.

NB: should have mentioned, This error message is appearing in
the Apache error log which I suspect is linked to the code

'ps' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

[drew010]

hi,
it wont work because ps is a unix program and nothing like it exists on windows, besides hitting control-alt-delete and selecting the performance tab, and even that is pretty different.

if you sit tight a few minutes, im writing a command line program for windows in c++ that will report the current cpu usage. ill post a url to the exe when im done, so you can get your cpu monitor working 🙂

[ForeverBlue]

Thanks for the quick reply 🙂 sorry it took me so long to read it :o
I'll catch up with this thread later on if you don't mind 🙂

It's gone 5 am now and I've got to try and catch a couple of hours
sleep 😃 😃 My wife thinks I'm attached to my system more than
Her already LOL.

[drew010]

i made a little command line program you can use to get the cpu usage.
you can download it from www.drew-phillips.com/scripts/. its under c++ programs, called cpu usage.

you could use it by modifying your script like this:
$percent = exec('cpu -u');

make sure that cpu.exe is in the same folder, or to not have to worry about that, put it in your windows system folder.

[dave420]

http://www.sysinternals.com has pslist, which is the same thing (more-or-less). In fact, they have lots of command-line (read: usable from within PHP 🙂) apps, which do lots of really powerful stuff. Definitely worth looking at 🙂

[onion2k]

Heisenberg* would have a fit. Measuring system load by running a program? Pfft, that'd mean any reading is wrong.

• I think it was Heisenberg who stated that taking a measurement of a system affected the system and made any measurement wrong. Its his Uncertainity Principle. Advanced Physics lesson over folks..

[bubblenut]

Just as a note,

ps ax | grep -c apache

does not show you the processor load, it shows you how many httpd processes are running plus one (grep httpd counts as a process with httpd in it). So, if the number you got back was 12 then that would mean there were 11 httpd processes. One of those is the main one, so there are 10 child httpd processes. Interesting but not actually what you were asking for.
On a nix machine a far better sollution would be to make use of the w command, more specifically.

w | head -n1 | egrep -o "([0-9]+\.[0-9]{2}, ){2}[0-9]+\.[0-9]{2}"

This will return three comma seperated numbers for the processor load average*.
The first is the average over the last 1 minute, the second 5mins and the third 15mins. These numbers can be very usefull for load balancing accross multiple servers and the fact that you have averages at 1, 5 and 15 minute histories allows you to pick out spikes without having to store any logs of the load average.

Hope this is helpfull, even if it's not going to be any use on a Windows box.

*Processor load average is the number of processes qued on the processor, this is basically the lowest level representation of processor load.

[ForeverBlue]

Many thanks to everyone who responded, very helpful,
drew010, that's a handy little prog thankyou .
😃