Uptime Monitoring Every Second – Bad For the Server?

Can “any” server handle it? Probably.

Should you do it? Probably not.

Ask yourself a few questions:

  1. How fast will you be to respond to
    an outage?
  2. How many pageviews do
    you normally receive per second?
  3. How many consecutive errors are you
    willing to see before calling it
    “Down” and sending an alert?
  4. Do you have any SLA with internal or external customers that needs to be honored?
  5. Based the questions listed above what seems like a reasonable monitoring and response time?

When I was first learning to
program, I decided I wanted to make a
stopwatch. When I finally got a
working application, I noticed the CPU
usage on my laptop was at 100%
whenever I ran it.

My execution loop didn’t have a wait
cycle. It just kept executing over the
time function.

On that day I learned a valuable
lesson: there is no such thing as an
infinitely accurate measurement.

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