Flash/PHP/Apache problem.

[yuvallahav]

Hello.

 

To make a very long story short, I will start with the scope of the project, and then the problem I have.

Just a note, if you feel more secure answering in Italian, please do so, non c'i sono problemi con Italino.

So the project, in general, is a platform for multiplayer games which I made using flash and php to create the server side script, which from now on I will call the "socket server".

I have done this before with a server aopplication I wrote in VB6 which was simple enough, but now I had to make this work with a php server side.

Everything works fine, I have a server working, clients connecting and playing, and all seems just fine, when I have less then 100 users at any given time inside my system, playing.

When the number rises, and I've been to 350 users at the same time, something happens to the server which makes the whole thing freeze.

After I eliminated just about everything that can go wrong with the php side of things, we came to the conclusion that this must be something related to the apache, since if before the php socket server went bad on account of an error, we simply needed to relaunch the php again, and everything would start up and work just fine untill the next crash.

Now, with no errors on the php side (and as I said, up to 100 users works just fine for days on end), when the thing freezes up, it would seem we need to restart Apache too, to get the socket server running again, as it would seem, my main socket, my master socket, is still bound to the port we are using.

We have a unix server, using Apache 2, php 4.something or 5 (but again, problem is not there), did anyone knows what this could be? are we passing some limit of sockets connections Apache has that we don't know about? a limit of data transfer we are breaking? my script, when running and holding on to 300 users, use about 2-3 Mbit of bandwidth, nothing to get excited about.

 

Can some one help?!!

 

Thanks.

 

Yuval Lahav.