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In this article, I'll talk about using mod_status and mod_info to tell you how your server is performing right now.

What sort of information can I get?

Using mod_status, you can tell who is looking at what on your server right now. You can tell how many people are on the web site right now. And you can see other things that may not be of particular interest to your customer, but is useful to you as the site administrator.

Customers love this stuff

I don't know how your customers are, but my customers like information. How much information? More information. Up-to-the-minute information. Detailed information. Daily reports are not good enough, because by the end of the day, it's already too late. They want to know what's going on right now.

In fact, I have one customer who ... well, I suppose I shouldn't say anything more. After all, he might actually read my column.

Anyways, the point is, customers love this sort of thing. By giving them this sort of detailed information, at the cost of a few configuration changes, you are the hero and it looks like you did a lot of work for it. Don't worry. I won't tell.

mod_info and mod_status

There are two modules that I'll talk about in this column. They give you two rather different types of information, but they are both very handy.

mod_info tells you about your server: how it was built, and how it's configured.

mod_status tells you exactly what your server is thinking about right now.

mod_status

mod_status is the more exciting of the two modules. You can watch what folks are looking at on your site, how many child processes are running, and what those processes are doing.

If you did a default build of Apache, you will have mod_status installed, and all that you will have to do is add the following lines to your configuration file. (Actually, you will probably find them already there, commented out.)

     # Server status
     <Location /server-status>
         SetHandler server-status
         Order deny,allow
         Deny from all
         Allow from .your_domain.com
     </Location>

The SetHandler directive tells Apache that when it receives a request that matches the specified context (in this case, a location matching /server-status, that instead of looking in that directory for a file, it should rather pass control over to the specified handler, which is usually provided by a module or by a CGI (or similar) process.

The mod_status module defines a handler (server-status) and one directive (ExtendedStatus).

With the configuration above, accessing the resource /server-status will present you with a summary of server activity as of right now. You'll get a representation of how many servers you have running (child processes) and how this relates to your maximum number of servers, which you set with MaxClients.

This will look something like:

     W_________......................................................
     ................................................................
     ................................................................
     ................................................................

The W represents a child process that is sending a reply. The _ represents a child that is idle, waiting for an incoming connection. Each . represents a potential child that does not exist yet. One slot is displayed for each potential server you have permitted, as per MaxClients

In the example above, only one child was active, while 9 others were waiting in the wings for incoming traffic.

It will additionally tell you how long the server has been up since the last restart, the date and time of that last restart, and there will be a key explaining each of the symbols appearing in the diagram.

If you want more information than this, you need to use ExtendedStatus. By default set to Off, ExtendedStatus gives additional information about what your server is up to. In addition the information above, you'll also get a table listing each child and what it is doing. It will list the child processes that are currently active, and tell you what resource each of them is serving, to whom, and from what virtual host the resources are coming. (Where ``to whom'' means, usually, what IP address.)

For each child, you'll get the PID, how many times that particular child has been accessed, and how much CPU time it is using.

For the server, you'll get a count of total ``hits'' since server restart, CPU usage, and a ``hits per minute'' statistic, as well as a total quantity of data that has been pushed out to clients.

For the purposes of amusing the customer, you really should turn on ExtendedStatus as, without it, it's a little cryptic.

Which brings me to the rest of the above configuration.

Although it might amuse the customer to know who is accessing what resource, you probably don't want this information available to the whole Internet. And, with some customers, you might not even want them knowing this sort of thing. There are questions of user confidentiality to be addressed, but I'll leave that to your own conscience for the moment.

You should restrict access to this service to hosts you know about, and which you think should have access to the information for actual valid reasons. There are voyeurs that get great entertainment from watching server-status displays to see who's looking at what. And this means that they are reloading every 10 seconds to see the latest stats. This imposes an unnecessary load on your server, and does not benefit your or your customer in any way. Hence, we have some Deny and Allow rules set up in the example above, which ensure that nobody is looking at this who should not be.

mod_info

mpd-info is classified as an Extension module, which means that it is not built into your copy of Apache unless you intentionally added it in. That is, it is not built in by default.

mod_info is less interesting to the customer, but is very useful to the system administrator. Especially if, like me, you have a large number of servers that you are responsible for, and you can't for the life of you remember what you've built into each.

Use the following set of directives:

     <Location /server-info>
         SetHandler server-info
         Order deny,allow
         Deny from all
         Allow from .your-domain.com
    </Location>

The server-info page might be a good page to load, print, and keep on file. (In fact, having written that, I think I'll do that when I get back to the office on Monday!) What you get with this handler is a listing of all the things that you have built into your server, how you have things configured, and various other specifics about your server.

At the top of the page, when you access http://your.server/server-info/ you'll see a list of each of the modules that is built into your server, or is loaded as a DSO. Each of these is linked to a section lower down in the document where you will have listed all of the active configuration directives that are defined by that module, wherever in the configuration file they might be placed.

This is great for figuring out quickly how a particular server is set up, and for trouble-shooting any problems that you might be having which are caused by misconfiguration.

Examples?

There's no very effective way for me to show you a running example of these modules running on my servers, as I have them configured to only show these pages to certain addresses. But the change can be made very quickly on your server (unless you don't have the modules installed!) and you can try it for yourself.

That's all for this week

Please let me know if you have any particular subjects that you'd like for me to cover in the future. You can contact me via the Talkbacks, or email me at

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