As the inaugural post on my new blog, I figured I’d start with something I put to good use today. When developing a PHP application or monitoring a web server, it’s important to know what your server load is to properly identify that there is a problem. This can be achieved through most control panel software (like WHM) or by typing in “uptime” in your SSH command prompt.

For those interested, there is a very easy way to output your load in PHP using the exec function. See the code below.

Place that snippet wherever you want in your PHP application to output the current server load. If you want to display something like “03:55:48 up 49 days, 13:36, 0 users, load average: 0.04, 0.12, 0.10″ instead of just “0.04″, you can delete lines 2-4 of the code.

Of course, since “uptime” is a Unix command this won’t work on Windows servers, and from what I understand, there’s no easy solution for those users.