“My Web server for http//perltraining.stonehenge.com is on a
nicely configured shared Linux box at a 24×7-manned co-location
facility. While I’m not really system administrator for this box, I
still want to be sure that my Web things aren’t bogging the system
down unnecessarily. (If that happens, the other e-commerce users
will start rallying to kick me off.) This is especially true as I
experiment more with dynamically generated pages and toys for
columns like this one.”
“So, the other day, I found myself invoking the Linux standard
top program, taking stabs at configuring it to watch
my Web server. But since I’m not the only httpd-something on the
machine, I kept seeing other Web servers there, and it messed up my
view. Also, I couldn’t tell if the child CGI scripts were expensive
or cheap, since they would show up as some other process in the
display.”
“I thought to myself that it’d be nice to have a Perl
program that does just what I want top to really do:
get the information about the processes that make up my Apache
server, and show how CPU-bound and page-fault-bound they are,
including any child CGI processes that got launched.”