Posted by cwdjrxyz on 09/28/07 16:33

On Sep 28, 10:45 am, William Gill <nore...@example.invalid> wrote:
> Andy Dingley wrote:
> > On 28 Sep, 14:11, fulio pen <fulio...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> I wonder if there is a limit on the number of visits to a site or page
> >> at the same time.
>
> > I very much doubt it (literally), although this is subject to the
> > tricky interpretation of "visit", "site" and "page".
>
> I interpreted "the number of visits to a site or page at the same time."
> to mean "the number of simultaneous requests that will be served" as in
> the Apache MaxClients directive, which defaults to 256.
>
> Your comments on what some hosts call "bandwidth" i.e. "how many HTML
> pages it can "serve" over time", and other capacity constrictions are
> valid. However, I think typically when a host refers to "bandwidth"
> they mean "you can deliver X# of Gbits per month." They usually do
> their administration after the fact, by processing log info. If you
> exceed your limit you get warned or billed a surcharge. I used to
> co-own an ISP, but I don't remember how we did it, and I'm sure there
> are more sophisticated ways of metering it now.

I get up to a maximum number of GB of bandwidth per month. If that is
exceeded, I will get charged for the excess bandwidth at the end of
the month. Other hosts sometimes just cut off your site until the end
of the month if you exceed the bandwidth you have paid for. I can
limit my bandwidth per hour, or other time unit or can limit the
number of visitors signed into it at one time in several different
ways. This is done from the account control panel. I have "unlimited"
disc storage space. The host says you can not put up a page that uses
over a certain percentage of server capacity. If you exceed this,
which likely would require something very extreme such as massive data
bases or computing, your site gets closed down until the problem is
corrected.

For the most part, html servers just slow down as they begin to become
overloaded. They download part of the data at a time, The time between
download "spurts" becomes longer and longer as more and more people
are using the server. In effect the slowdown is shared by all users
of the server. This situation will not do for a busy streaming media
site, such as a web radio or TV station. A certain minimum download
rate is required to keep the media streaming. Thus a special media
server often is set up to limit the number of people viewing it at one
time. When that limit is exceeded, no one else can get on until some
people sign out. Typically when too busy, you get a message that the
service is too busy to use.

[Back to original message]