PHP Executions Tutorial

PHP is well known and established programming language used by more than 80% of the websites available on the World Wide Web. It's purpose as a programming language is to solve programming and real-life issues by implementing programming logic into end product often called Script. A script written in PHP is a physical file containing programming code structured following a programming logic and written by a programmer or a web developer. Such files are executed in order to function. As a PHP Execution, we will consider each call to the PHP interpreter by the Web Server and the whole process of compiling and executing the PHP code of a script.

Why are the PHP Executions so important?

The common Operating System architecture suggests that each spawned process consumes a certain or variable amount of hardware resources such as RAM, CPU or IOPS. On the other hand, each Web Hosting Account is limited to the amount of such resources it can utilize.

If we use the If-Then analysis method, we can come to the conclusion that PHP executions are very important for the health of your hosting environment:

• If 100% of the allocated to the web hosting account hardware resources are used, then there will be NO free resources. Thus no processes can be executed.
• If no processes can be executed and considering the explanation that PHP Executions are actual processes, then this will mean that no further PHP Executions can be performed.
• If no PHP Executions can be performed, then the Web Server will be unable to call the PHP interpreter when a visitor's request hit the web server.
• If the web server is unable to respond to a visitor's request, then the visitor will be presented with an error as a response and the requested website will not be displayed.

For more information on the PHP interpreter and Web Server functionality, check our tutorial on "how PHP Executions work".