From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Aug 3 16:10:18 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA24907 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 3 Aug 1997 16:10:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from horst.bfd.com (horst.bfd.com [204.160.242.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA24902 for ; Sun, 3 Aug 1997 16:10:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from harlie.bfd.com (bastion.bfd.com [204.160.242.14]) by horst.bfd.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id QAA29466; Sun, 3 Aug 1997 16:10:08 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 16:10:08 -0700 (PDT) From: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" To: Katherine Nenno cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD and large #s of http requests In-Reply-To: <3.0.2.32.19970803145947.00920210@mail.gte.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sun, 3 Aug 1997, Katherine Nenno wrote: > We host a web site for a popular radio show host (#2 in the US, 1 in > Canada). Recently (a few months ago), we planned to have a interactive > chat with her where people could ask her questions and she could respond. > What we didn't count on was the number of http requests this would generate. How many hits/users? My chatroom doesn't stress my machine with 17 people in the room (admittedly not much, but it's the record so far) with lesser hardware. What room are you using now? > The site is hosted on a Pentium Pro 200 machine with 64 meg RAM running > Apache 1.2.0 and FreeBSD 2.1.7. The chat script was a custom perl script > that we contracted out to have written. We didn't anticipate the number of > hits that this would generate. Within the first minute the server crashed. > > Now, we have been asked if we can fix the problem and have another chat > that will work. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to do > this? Is it even possible without buying tons of expensive equipment? Certainly, you just need the right room design. You need a persistant program, rather than reading and writing files for every request. This can be achieved either by using FCGI for the chat script (I did a 200 line chat room in FCGI/Perl that was decent once), or by setting up a server process that the CGI processes talk to. There's a third option, but it produces a chat room that feels different than the other two. What kind of chat room are you looking for?