Hello one and all,

I have a virtual hosting account and my host provider - which has been great - has contacted me about over utilization of the server and I'm trying to get a grasp on when I should be looking toward a dedicated server.

I have a completely PHP4/mysql database oriented site which serves 3000-5000 pages a day with about .5 meg per day transfer total. The site is somewhat CPU intensive as most all requests invoke well written (at least I think so anyway) PHP scripts which call on the 20 Meg database. This would seem like a very small server load and well within the limits of a shared server environment but I'm uncertain if my constant scripting moves the site into the dedicated host region. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your comments.

Steve

Do you have telnet access to the server? If so, you could log in and take a look at 'top', which will give you an idea of how much of the CPU and memory your processes are taking. It'll also tell you how much memory is installed on the system, which could be a factor in your host contacting you.

Good suggestion, I'll give it a try.

The nice thing about PHP4 is that its Zend engine is very fast and efficient--significantly more so than Perl (from what I have read). 15 gigs a month is just a little bit heavy for a shared server environment though; I think the kind of performance you get from a shared environment will depend on how heavily the provider has loaded their servers.

Thanks for your comments, but look again, .5(500,000)Meg per day so I'm no where near 15Gig. I think the CPU and memory load from my scripts is going to be the deciding factor. I'm just surprised I'm bogging down a Athlon 900 with 512meg but I trust my host provider and they certainly know what they're doing.

Also, I my ISP doesn't allow commands like top or uptime - I'm not surprised as these just add to the server load.

Tell your ISP to install the Zend Optimizer from http://www.zend.com. It caches scripts and speeds up execution a lot. We use it on all of our servers (we run a lot of php) and have noticed speed improvements of about 40% on average.

Whoops... misread your post. So you're using ~15 megs a month--that's next to nothing. It doesn't seem possible to me that you could come anywhere close to bogging down a 900 MHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM--not running a reasonably well-written BB script anyway.

As far as I know, top adds almost nothing to the server load, and uptime is a simple status report showing server uptime and load for the last few minutes (it wouldn't be useful in showing how much load your site is putting on a shared server anyway).

'BB' script ? Pardon my ignorance, what's BB.

Originally posted by SteveL
I have a completely PHP4/mysql database oriented site which serves 3000-5000 pages a day with about .5 meg per day transfer total.

Steve, this just doesn't add up. Let's do the math:

1024 Kb = 1 Mb

So you are saying that your site, with page views of about 3,000-5,000 times per day, is only using 512 Kb of transfer (per day)? Even if we take 512 Kb and divide (the low end) 3,000 page views , that means your pages are approx 0.17 Kb each? Less than a 1/5 of a Kb???

Example: The page you are reading right now is 53.2 Kb and as you can see, barely has any graphics at all.

This page, viewed 3,000 times, would be 156 Mb/day.
This page, viewed 5,000 times, would be 260 Mb/day.

Your calculations are way off. You are using much more than 0.5 Mb/day.

------------------------------

I just checked out your site and realized that your site just returns *very* small amounts of data with each view. i suppose it is possible that you don't use much. Maybe I'm completely off (I know I am, but I'm still amazed that you'd only transfer 1/5 - 1/10 Kb per page. That's impressive :))

[Edited by Chicken on 02-13-2001 at 11:18 PM]

Originally posted by SteveL
'BB' script ? Pardon my ignorance, what's BB.
BB=Bulletin Board

I went to the Site if you go in to list roses by name and going to the list M (4000+) I received 240kb in transfer. So I would guess someone going over the whole list is probably going to burn up MBs in a matter of Mins.

Originally posted by Chicken
[BI just checked out your site and realized that your site just returns *very* small amounts of data with each view. i suppose it is possible that you don't use much. Maybe I'm completely off (I know I am, but I'm still amazed that you'd only transfer 1/5 - 1/10 Kb per page. That's impressive :))
[/B]

How is it possible? I visisted his homepage too, and no way it only returns 100-200 bytes per page viewed... With graphics? that would be weird! I just don't understand... :(

cheers,
:beer:

As far as I know, top adds almost nothing to the server load

My Host disabled top too. You can set the interval which it updates, and higher intervals can consume a large chunk of CPU (1% and even more for continuous update on an 850)

Originally posted by dektong
How is it possible?
Well, I'm not sure, but many of the clicks I went through, only a few words were sent, so it could be possible that these are 100-200 byte page views in some cases. I don't know exactly.

The site is all about roses and for many roses very little information is available. We also don't use much in the way of graphics so it's common for a request to only require a very small amount of text.

Thanks for all your input.

Find out if your host has output buffering turned on, and compiled apache with mod_gzip (I think it's that). Then you could use the spiffy new PHP feature that lets you send compressed pages (if the visitors's browser supports it, most new ones do). I've heared people who succeeded in turning 240kb pages into 80kb and less... increasing dl speed and reducing bandwidth use.

Yes, I've already contacted them about that and it's on their schedule; they actually are a great service provider. I'm looking forward to implementing it asap. Anyone else currently using mod_gzip care to comment.

The real question is how can I best measure the system resources used by my various PHP scripts. I have my own test environment (Linux server) but watching a 'TOP' display while I test scripts is less than ideal. Any of you Linux experts care to offer suggestions. Thanks.

the new vbulletin software (v2... whoch has been released.. whay!! :) ) uses gzip on all pages.. u need php 4.04 and zlib however

There's another possibility in lieu of a dedicated server, shared sever hosting with a more limited number of accounts on the server. Many hosts offer them and this may be just what you need.

Find out if your host has output buffering turned on, and compiled apache with mod_gzip (I think it's that). Then you could use the spiffy new PHP feature that lets you send compressed pages (if the visitors's browser supports it, most new ones do). I've heared people who succeeded in turning 240kb pages into 80kb and less... increasing dl speed and reducing bandwidth use.


But won't making the server compress all the output just increase, not decrease, his CPU usage? Bandwidth doesn't seem to be a problem for him - cpu/memory usage seems to be what is the "overusage".


Also, it was my understanding that some browsers had trouble with gzip compressed pages resulting in the user seeing pages of garbled characters - IE 5 or 5.5 on the Mac was it?

Duster, thanks for the tip but the alternatives I found were close in price to many of the current dedicated server options. I really like to stay with my current ISP without making them unhappy.
BTW, I checked out your site and found it tremendously useful. Nice and concise, wish I had know about it a year ago as I'd be a year further now.

Thanks again to all for your suggestions and help.