We have a Netscape Enterprise Server 3.6 running on a Solaris 7 box. It becomes progressively more CPU intensive the longer it runs. The Web Admin is planning on upgrading to a more current version within the next couple of months and does not want to expend any of Web Services energy to diagnose/solve the problem (hoping that the upgrade will magically solve everything). So, they want me to provide a short-term solution.

First, let me say that I'm not happy with the aesthetics of the situation or solutions I'm considering. I feel that Web Services should determine what the problem is and fix it. No analysis has been done to determine what the problem is or whether upgrading will really make a difference. Second, I'm just looking for suggestions/feedback, not code, nor Web Server tuning tips.

Currently, the Web Admin is notified by irrate users or determines by periodically monitoring the ns-httpd daemon via top that the server has bogged down. He then stops and restarts the daemon manually using stop and start commands. I know this sucks but at least I got him to stop power-cycling the Sun box whenever response times became sluggish.

I did some preliminary searches on CPAN and PerlDoc for perl modules that might give process statistics directly with no success. My solution is to kick off a perl script (via cron) every 10 minutes or so, scarf CPU utilization percentages derived from top 4 or 5 times (pausing a second or two between polls), average them, make a determination as to whether or not to perform a stop/start on the daemon, and then either exit or restart the server.

The Web Server fetches static pages for the most part and does very little, if any transaction processing.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

In reply to HTTP Daemonology by jlongino

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