PHP POST calls makes website unresponsive

[leoleo]

Hi everyone

I have a website on an ultimate hosting plan using cpanel/linux. I am building a game on javascript and I frequently have to store the player's position/score/moves on the server, which I do using PHP-POST storing everything on a mySQL database.

It all works well most of the time, but after about 150 or so POST calls, the website is then unresponsive - the next POST call gets no response (no errors, nothing), and even trying to refresh the website gets no responses - so once triggered, the block goes beyond POST calls. It takes around 2-3 minutes to respond again.

If I turn on a VPN, it works again - for a while, and then it becomes unresponsive again after 150 or so calls, so it looks like the error is linked to each IP address -- is there a limit on POST calls from each IP address? How can I solve this?

Many thanks!

Leo

[JHasselbring · Accepted solution]

There are many reason why a site does not respond.

• Open up your terminal and ssh into your server.
• Use the command top or htop to display all of the process currently running on your server.
• Do the post request and watch what happen to top or htop.  
• Is the RAM usage filling up?
• Is the CPU usage staying high?
• Is apache spwning to many processes?
• Nothing happens?
• Which process is always on top? apache? phpfpm? mysql? for how long?

If you plan on making a multi player game, I recommend using a high concurrency server-side language like nodejs