how do i get system stats in PHP

Question

i am launching a beta version of a web app and i want to log system information about resources. system monitors eat up way too much resources and do a lot more than what i need. What i want to do is get key stats and log them every time a user logs in.

these are the stats i am interested in:

• number of users - i have done this already
• system 5 min and 15 min loads - php's get load average
• outgoing bandwidth on eth0 - ????
• free memory - ????

so how do i get outgoing traffic and free memory statistics?

Answer 1

If you are using a *nix machine you should be able to do:

free -t -m

and it will give you information on free memory in MB.

It is easy to create a simple script that you can schedule in crontab.

Answer 2

As far as network traffic, you might want to look into ntop.

Answer 3

If you want to see how it's done, have a look at phpSysInfo.

Answer 4

On a Linux/Unix based system, you can read the files in /proc/, such as /proc/meminfo and /proc/net/dev (though for networking, the output of the command 'netstat -i' is a lot easier to parse).