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If you want to provide a service but switch off some functions in high load... How Would you do that? Example would Be twitter switching off customer related feeds during high Server load

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  • Sry for typo, wrote from my phone
    – mlaug
    Jun 3, 2011 at 10:17

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We (and the BBC and BAA) use a product called a ZXTM from Zeus for just that reason. It's bloody expensive and I detest their sales people/attitude but it can be setup (alongside some code changes) to 'de-dynamicise' (not a real word) web responses - so as your site becomes busier the more generic becomes the response. The BBC in particular use this very well, next time some big news event happens take a look at their news site, all of a sudden images become static and more easily cacheable, same for text, scrolling things etc. Basically you can just get the ZXTM to skip divs on load or a number of other things. It really works but like I say very spendy.

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  • thanks for the hint. spending moeny is not the main problem but expenses for that tool should be reasonable. i will have look, thanks
    – mlaug
    Jun 3, 2011 at 14:41
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You would have to build this ability into your code, so that it could either query your server, or that some monitoring software could alert your software to a high load issue. Then when it hits a certain threshold have your software disable part of itself. Your not going to find something of the shelf that will do this, how would it know what to do with your software?

There are plenty of monitoring solutions that will call a script when they hit a threshold and so cause your software to adapt.

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  • but what if i do not want to start a php process to save even more server resources and respond only with a 503 or just a blank page? I thought of a apache module which does not trigger php fcgi at a certian threshold
    – mlaug
    Jun 3, 2011 at 11:35
  • since the php process, even if the php script does nothing, takes up a lot of resources if thousand of people hit it
    – mlaug
    Jun 3, 2011 at 11:39
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    Perhaps you should consider caching the result of the php pages for a minute or two. That might decrease load exponentially during peak usage.
    – Chris S
    Jun 3, 2011 at 12:43
  • that would not be an option, since the results are user related, so caching would only help in long term
    – mlaug
    Jun 3, 2011 at 14:38

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