Question

I am building a custom component for my webapp that will benchmark each service, so far the plan is to benchmark the usual stuff:

• Response Time
• Memory
• Current server activity

etc.

I have built the basic stuff and i was thinking to store the output of the linux “top” command, which lists the current running processes and the amount of used resources.
Though, i haven’t been able to obtain any responde from running:

$output = shell_exec('top');
echo "<pre>";
var_dump($output);
echo "</pre>";

But other simpler commands do work, like the example in the php manual:

$output = shell_exec('ls -lart');

So my questions are:
– Do I need to run the “top” command as root? (currently it runs under apache user)
– Or are there any other php command that could help me get server statistics?

I read this post, but im not really interested in installing anything, as i need my stats on the demand and store them on my DB.
PHP server statistics script?

Answer 1

You could cat anything in the /proc directory like cat /proc/cpuinfo to get any CPU information about the server. Everything in linux can be reduced to the file system and any system statistics that you would ever want to find can be found in /proc (well almost all stats)