Zombie Proccesses at 250+ reqs/min. High load php...

Hey folks, A site I run has begun hitting over 250 reqs/minute which is great :) What's not so great is that the PHP stuff I put together can't seem to handle the load. I'm looking for others sense of what may be going on. It is exciting to run a high traffic site using PHP, but we can't do so if PHP falls down. I'm most interested in ways in which PHP might create zombies and/or exit uncleanly. In a high load situation this can be deadly. Running PHP4.0.0 as a CGI, using something similar to the optimized version of php.ini. Sessions are enabled and used. Auto Start == true The general outline of a page load is a call to a script which includes() 3-4 files, creates a new instance of a larger class (2,000 lines or so), calls the appropriate methods on the class, exit those methods, opens a logfile and writes some auditing data. A couple of questions include: What's the overhead on creating a large class? We can certainly avoid doing so. Often times the script sends out a redirect. Any chance this blows things out of the water? Would opening and closing a log file at that rate lead to problems? Anyone else have high load problems with PHP4? We might be able to backport and do our own sessions. Do we need to make sure we call exit? Release resources? The script tends to execute in something like .3 seconds and is not long-running from that point of view. We are already planning on moving to mod_php. What concerns me is the specter that PHP is leaking resources or generating zombies which will not disappear no matter how much hardware we throw at the problem. Tips and tricks for very high load programming (going onto a million requests/day) would be appreciated. Gotchas especially within the language. We've got a ton of global statements, does that matter? You wouldn't think so but who knows? We are certainly going to throw hardware at the problem. Basically, I'd love to have PHP scale along for the ride! It's a great package. August Zajonc Please CC me if possible as my free access net connectivity is limited and it is hard to track the list directly :) ________________________________________________________ 1stUp.com - Free the Web Get your free Internet access at http://www.1stUp.com