An "Entry Process" is how many PHP scripts you have running at a single time. Our standard shared hosting for example has a limit of 30 PHP scripts executions at a single time. Every time a request to a PHP script on the websites in your hosting account is made, a new program is started to execute this PHP code. This process then executes your code, sends the response to the visitor, and finally quits.
Is it the limit of the visitors on my website per second?
Usually, an "Entry Process" only takes around a second to finish, therefore most people get it confused with how many visitors they can have on their website at a given time. A 30 limit Entry Process for example doesn't mean only 30 people can be on your website at once because the likelihood of all 30 people hitting your website at the exact same second is less likely to happen (provided your website is a small or mid-sized blog/store/portal etc).
When a visitor browses any web page of your website, the web server starts serving that request. While this request is being served, it will use one entry process. Once this request has been served, the web server will quit the entry process and the entry process count would get decreased by 1. Please note that cron jobs, shell scripts, MySQL requests, and other commands also use entry process for the duration of the time they are running.
On average, an entry limit of up to 30 usually handle 50-60 visitors on your website at once. If you have a generally low traffic website but you see constant hits of the Entry Processes limit, this indicates something wrong with your scripts being hanging around longer than they should.
How do I reduce my entry process usage?
- Make sure static files (like pure HTML files) don't have the .php file extension, because all requests to files with the .php extension generate entry processes, even if there is no actual PHP code in the file.
- Reduce usage of AJAX and other background requests. If your website has code that constantly refreshes the page in the background (to check for changes or new messages), this can easily cause high entry process usage with few visitors.
- Implement cache mechanisms whenever possible.
Why we have this limit on shared hosting?
We have created entry process limitations to ensure that no single user consumes all server resources and to prevent DDoS attacks against the web server. Entry process will limit the number of concurrent connections to web server, thus preventing our server against malicious traffic.
