Apache Load: Is the little server on fire yet?

In my line of work I see a lot of servers that like to run 50 to
thousands of websites on a single server, the lot of which want
MySQL, PHP, etc. to all run as if they were the only website
accepting connections. Somehow owners of such servers don't
believe me when I say: The server is maxed out, if we increase
Apache's limits it will only make things worse. Aside from watching
vmstat I found myself always looking to see how many Apache
processes were running, what MaxClients was set to, and how
many established web connections there currently were. Then
I did the smart (or lazy) thing and made a Perl script to do it
for me: apacheload.pl

It makes a little report like this:
Apache MaxClients: 250
Apache processes: 221
Established web connections: 191
Apache load: 77%

There's a little more to read about it (like what happens when
Apache load exceeds 100%) at:
<link removed>

Or you can simply grab it with:
wget codenode.com/apacheload.pl

I'd like to hear what others can get on Apache performance index
while still keeping their whole server running smoothly.

 

 

 

 

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