My site has a banner exchange program written in perl which may be run 100 times per a second. One of my friends has also installed this program on his host.
My site is working properly under the pressure of this program but my friend's server crashs every other day.
What characteristic of a server cause it to work properly under the prussure of such a program?

Originally posted by kissiran
My site has a banner exchange program written in perl which may be run 100 times per a second. One of my friends has also installed this program on his host.
My site is working properly under the pressure of this program but my friend's server crashs every other day.
What characteristic of a server cause it to work properly under the prussure of such a program?

What specs are the two servers?

And what kind of load averages do you see on your server?

These are a few reason why a server could crash from my experience:

1. Some version of Linux doesn't do well under tight memory consumption. Try upgrading the kernel and/or adding more memory.

2. Some early version of Linux (2.0-2.2) doesn't do well when used with multi processor system, it just crashes when used under load. Try upgrading the kernel to the latest 2.4 version.

3. Faulty hardware or buggy driver. Try another hardware or get a latest driver or kernel.

I would personally recommend changing the O/S to FreeBSD. I personally think it handles server loads much better. You also may look into getting a different / more efficient banner exchange program (if he is not using the same exact one). The server he may be on may be very slow or shared among too many users.