Problems benchmarking php Scripts

Hello together, I have been trying to benchmark the backend scripting for a flash online game, for this purpose i wrote another PHP Script that uses fopen to make exactly the same requests the flash movie would make with the same timing, and writes a log of the game session into a database. I run this script from the shell of a linux box using the php CGI binary, and start it for a couple of times, but somehow i rarely get more than 66 of those benchmark scripts started simultaneously, neither on one machine, nor on two machines together, so i guessed it has sth to do with my apache confguration, i set startservers and min and maxspare childs to a high value to prevent the httpds from crashing when there are more than 20 to be started in very short time and set maxrequests per child to 256, but none of these changes seem to affect the total number of scripts i can run. The mysql keeps spawning processes of itself and i can still connect to the database when i get to the max of running benchmark scripts, so there does not seem to be a limit of some kind there either. Sometime i get to start a hundred scripts or more, but they disappear in very short time. i have the outputs pointed to /dev/null when putting the scripts into the background (start with &), when i start a single one with output there are no error messages displayed. I also noticed when looking at the output of 'top' i see few httpd processes crashing saying <defunct>, this happens more rarely when i heve enough httpds started before i start running the benchmark, but some still crash, i can't find any messages in log files saying what happened there. The benchmark scripts should log errors if there was no response from the server but i dont get any of those errors in the logs. thanks in advance Jens -- Grüße aus dem schönen Kleve Jens Kisters rosomm et partner Agentur für neue Medien GmbH Dienstleistungszentrum am Weißen Tor - Eingang B Gocher Landstrasse 2 47551 Kleve / Bedburg-Hau Telefon: 02821 - 97856-20 Telefax: 02821 - 97856-77 j.kisters@rosomm-partner.de http://www.rosomm-partner.de