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Originally Posted by TheToolWiz

I suspect that error was "too many open concurrent processes".

And please understand, this has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH RAP, per se!

It's a combination of prudent management techniques combined with a script that's acting as a proxy for serving up an extremely large download that can take an unusually LONG time (tens of minutes) to complete. That's a recipe doomed to failure!

Shared servers MUST limit the number of concurrent current processes they allow at a fairly small number or they'd risk swamping the entire server's resources very quickly. Even on a dedicated server it can be a problem.

Note that Apache ALWAYS imposes a limit on this. If it didn't, any of a number of otherwise innocent scripting errors could completely crash the server.

When you attempt to load a web page, it sends a page request to the Apache web server. That loads up the web page, frequently processing it through something like the php interpreter. Every include file, every image, every embedded object, is loaded by spawning a concurrent process. Most of the time these processes complete in a fraction of a second, so even web pages with hundreds of things on them are not a problem.

When you have a script like RAP or DLGuard or something else that "hides" download links behind a bit of script code, Apache spawns off a concurrent process to do the download -- it's basically acting as a proxy. This is different than if it passes the URL to your browser directly and the browser does the download itself. Even if the URL is to the same server and domain, a separate Apache process is invoked to handle that download, so it's not a "concurrent process" attached to the script that served up the link.

But if you start serving up things in concurrent processes that take more than a few seconds to fulfill, you can run into that wall pretty quickly. A 400MB download could take an HOUR or more to complete, tying up resources for that entire script on the server the whole time.

It wouldn't take very many people trying to access that script in a given 5 minute period to have it hit the wall, so to speak and start generating "500" errors.

That's why it's not a good idea to serve up videos, audios, and large protected files through your script, either on the sales page or on a download page.

Again, you wanna know why servers die during big launches? This is a very common cause. Only if it's a dedicated server, chances are you aren't knowledgeable enough to figure it out! You just hit the reset button and continue on your merry way.

Sometimes admins just crank up the number of concurrent processes that Apache can handle, thinking it's just not high enough, without realizing they'll bring the server to its knees at some point.

The solution is not to switch to a dedicated server so much as it is to host your large media and download files somewhere else, and do NOT force the script to act as proxy to load them up. In RAP's case, that means you might want to re-think using immediate downloading of large files. Consider hosting them on Amazon S3 and providing a separate DL link in a PDF they download, or even in an email.

Basically, separating the DL link from the download web page will solve the problem, although it defeats the purpose of having protected links on the DL page.

Choose your poison.

-David

Originally Posted by TheToolWiz

I suspect that error was "too many open concurrent processes"....

Choose your poison.

-David