What are "entry processess"?

[londrum]

forgive this probably dumb question, but can anyone explain what "entry processes" are?

cpu usage, bandwidth, memory and disk space i can understand, but my webhost is telling me that i am maxing out "entry processes", which is set at 20.

what would I have to look at, to get that number down?

[lammert]

My first guess would be that the host is talking about the maximum number of concurrent webserver processes which are allowed to run to process your webqueries.

If you are running Apache, you can get that number down by closing connections to clients as soon as the request is fullfilled with "KeepAlive Off" in your httpd.conf file. This may have impact on your server performance, so you should do some performance testing with this setting before making the permanent switch.

[londrum]

what would those processess include? would it add +1 every time you use a .php script and mysql query?

im guessing that parts of my website probably use 10 php scripts (through includes) and 2 or 3 database look-ups to build the page

if i just close all connections when i flush the page at the end, do you reckon that will bring it down

[lammert]

These processes are started when there is work to do like processing a page or PHP script for example, but in many Apache configurations these processes stay idle for a number of seconds to wait for a next request from the same client. During this period these processes are not able to process requests from other clients and just take up memory and process table space. With te setting "KeepAlive Off" every process stops listening to an existing client as soon as a request has been processed and becomes therefore available to process other requests. This will in general lower the amount of concurrent processes significantly, but the page loa time for each individual client may increase somewhat because for every new request of a page (CSS file, JS files, images etc) a new connection between the client and server has to be established.

[londrum]

thats a no-go for me unfortunately, because im on shared hosting and i cant fiddle with httpd.conf. i cant change it in .htaccess

the thing is... i cant believe that im using 20 different "processess"... unless they are counting every php include as a seperate process. but surely a .php script with 'includes' or 'requires' another one doesn't count as another process?

[graeme_p]

"Entry processes" usually means "concurrent connections". Its the number of web server processes running.

An include is not a separate process. A database connection IS a separate process, but NOT an "entry process". That is why they specify "entry processes".

Apache defaults to keeping a connection open for 15 seconds after the last request. So if you have twenty visitors in less than 15 seconds, you will hit the limit.

A client may open more than one connection at a time. e.g. a web browser may open one connection to load the HTML in, and when it gets to the first img tag open another to open download the image - and both stay open for 15 seconds. If each visitor opens two connections you will hit the limit at 10 visitors on 15 seconds.

DO you offer large file downloads? Download managers/accelerators often open multiple connections. Three simultaneous downloads with either connections each would go over your limit as well.

You may need to use different hosting. Neither of the hosts I use has this limit: one gives me my own event driven server instance (so one process handles multiple connections), the other is pay as you go based on traffic.