Recently there has been a little discussion about an API in apache for controlling starts, stops, restarts, etc...
I have an idea that may help me solve a problem I've been having. The problem is in limiting the number of processes that will run on a machine to somewhere below where the machine will keel over and die, while still being close to the maximum the machine will handle. The issue is depending on what the majority of those processes are doing it changes the maximum number a given machine can handle by a few orders of magnitude, so a multi-purpose machine that serves, say, static content and cgi scripts (or other things that vary greatly in machine resource usage) cannot be properly tuned for maximum performance while guaranteeing the machine won't die under heavy load. The solution I've thought of is... what if Apache had an API that could be used to say "no more processes, whatever you have NOW is the max!" or otherwise to dynamically raise or lower the max number (perhaps "oh there's too many, reduce a bit").... You see, an external monitoring system could monitor cpu and memory and whatnot and dynamically adjust apache depending on what it's doing..... This kind of system could really increase the stability of any large Apache server farm, and help keep large traffic spikes from killing apache so bad that nobody gets served anything at all. In fact this idea could be extended someday to dynamically change all sorts of apache configuration things, but all I really need that I know of right now is the max client value... What do you all think of this idea? Does this already exist perhaps? Dave
