How do I tell users that thge server's busy?

[kevintynfron]

Just been on the BBC iPlayer website and have been told that the servers are too busy, can I come back later.

 

How do I do that with Apache?

There seems to be two cases on the face of it. In the first case, I have the BBC-type scenario where the web server itself is Ok, but the back-end is busy. The second case is when I run out of apache processes (Like in another thread) What happens then? I can't inform users to wait because there's no processes to give them the information. Do they all go in a big queue?

 

Not after specifics, necessarily, as I imagine it may not be that simple. Big picture stuff will do.

 

Cheers,

Kevin

[alluoshi]

In Apache, you can determine the maximum number of simultaneous clients that are using your website. There is a "server limit" which is the OS limit (256 by default on Linux) and there is Maxclients (150 by default if you are using prefork module). If you are using the worker module, there are also settings to set the maximum number of threads. You can play with these numbers but it highly depends on the Hardware of your server to be able to support the clients.

What happens is when the number of simultaneous clients exceed the Maxclients, they will wait in a queue until some busy processes are done and can serve new clients

[kevintynfron]

Thanks alluoshi,

 

I was aware of that, and have adjusted maxclients up a bit. How big can the queue be and can I see the size of it?

[alluoshi]

You can play with ListenBacklog directive queue to modify the length of the pending connections

[kevintynfron]

Thanks