What an Overloaded PHP Server Actually Returns
Closed-loop benchmarks can't show you overload. An open-loop load generator with an error taxonomy showed ePHPm returned nothing at all, and then verified the fix.
Ask most people what their PHP server does when it’s overloaded and you’ll hear “it returns 503s.” Ask them how they
know and it usually comes down to a config setting they read about. I was in that camp for ePHPm.
We had a [server.limits] max_connections knob, and the docs said it returned 503 at the cap. Every benchmark we had
ever run reported zero errors under heavy load. Then I wrote a load generator that could produce overload. The honest
answer was that an…
