memory_get_usage() and benchmarks

[Tom]

Alternate subject title: Shared Hosting, Resource Usage, Standards and
Measures

I think of myself as a developer, not a sysadmin, but a couple projects
I've been working on for my small company (i.e. 3 people) have reached
a stage where we're ready to move them to a production server and I'm
overseeing the process.

The plan is to launch them on an affordable shared hosting plan to
start and move on to VPS and dedicated hosting as necessary as they
grow. I'm trying to take every precaution possible in running my
scripts efficiently and responsibly on a shared host, but after months
of research, I still have only a vague sense of how to accurately
benchmark a PHP script for a live environment.

One tool I've been playing with is the PHP memory_get_usage function.
I find that usage jumps from 28 MB from the beginning of a
representative PHP-scripted web page on our development server (before
our includes and libraries load and any database hits) to 34 MB at the
end of the page. An admin with the company with which we're hosting
told me that they automatically kill any scripts using over 200 MB. So
I'm inferring that this script is running well within reasonable
limits. But I'm not sure if I'm getting an accurate -- or even the
right type of -- measurement here.

Is this a reasonable conclusion? How do others address this issue?
Any help (e.g. links) someone could offer on this topic generally is
welcome.

Tom
http://phosphorusandlime.blogspot.co...ory-usage.html

[Tom]

I'm giving this a bump (I promise only once) just in case it got missed
by any benchmarking gurus over the weekend. :)

Thanks,
Tom
Tom wrote:

Alternate subject title: Shared Hosting, Resource Usage, Standards and
Measures

I think of myself as a developer, not a sysadmin, but a couple projects
I've been working on for my small company (i.e. 3 people) have reached
a stage where we're ready to move them to a production server and I'm
overseeing the process.

The plan is to launch them on an affordable shared hosting plan to
start and move on to VPS and dedicated hosting as necessary as they
grow. I'm trying to take every precaution possible in running my
scripts efficiently and responsibly on a shared host, but after months
of research, I still have only a vague sense of how to accurately
benchmark a PHP script for a live environment.

One tool I've been playing with is the PHP memory_get_usage function.
I find that usage jumps from 28 MB from the beginning of a
representative PHP-scripted web page on our development server (before
our includes and libraries load and any database hits) to 34 MB at the
end of the page. An admin with the company with which we're hosting
told me that they automatically kill any scripts using over 200 MB. So
I'm inferring that this script is running well within reasonable
limits. But I'm not sure if I'm getting an accurate -- or even the
right type of -- measurement here.

Is this a reasonable conclusion? How do others address this issue?
Any help (e.g. links) someone could offer on this topic generally is
welcome.

Tom
http://phosphorusandlime.blogspot.co...ory-usage.html