Number of processes limit?

[frankvh]

I just had an interesting chat with hostgator. They told me that with their shared hosting, there's a process limit of 25. So if you have enough simultaneous users on your site (some email, perhaps an ftp, a whole bunch of web accesses) to result in 25 simultaneous processes on the server for your account, the 26th process won't load - that user won't see the website. I can see it as a simple way of limiting usage for shared hosting, but it's also kind of ugly. A "this website cannot be displayed" kind of error is pretty harsh for a user.

Anyway, it made me wonder how hawkhost handles this. Do you have a process limit? Do you just monitor it, and inform the client if they're consistently getting up there in usage? What's the magic trick to keep things under control?

Thanks!

[Tony]

There is a process limit on the SSH end so if you have more than x amount it won't let you spawn anymore. On the web / PHP side there is a 10 process limit. The web server will keep a maximum pool of 10 for requests. This is 10 simultaneous requests keep in mind which is quite a bit. Even then it does not stop requests it just puts them on wait for a PHP process to open up to be used.

With process limits if you're hitting them and it's causing issues typically you need your owm server at that point anyways so not something to really worry about.

[32209]

With process limits if you're hitting them and it's causing issues typically you need your owm server at that point anyways so not something to really worry about.

How do you know if you are, or ever have, hitting them? Is that information archived somewhere in a Hawkhost shared hosting customer's C-panel/account?

When it comes to Wordpress sites, does WP-Cache, reduce the necessity for "spawning" additional processes?

Edited December 24, 2009 by 32209

[Tony]

There is no way for you to see if you're hitting it through your cPanel. In shell it won't let you spawn processes and on the PHP side your site will probably slow down.

So to answer the second question caching like wp-super-cache does reduce it since it stops serving the pages as PHP thus less PHP processes are required.