This site is now hosted on a brand new server! It's (again) a VPS from HostEurope, located in Germany.
We had to move our business because the old server with its 256M dedicated RAM wasn't sufficient for our needs anymore :(

But hey! we now have:

  • 5 terabyte monthly bandwidth! (five times what we had earlier)
  • 16 CPU cores Intel Nehalem @ 2.27 Ghz! (sixteen times what we had earlier)
  • 1024M dedi / 2048M shared! (four times what we had earlier)
  • 25GB diskspace (the double of what we had earlier)

Not that bad if you ask me :)

Now, with those new fancy features, I decided to put a modest server status page (sharpserv.net). (That's my first logo by the way!)
I couldn't find any php functions that would display server statistics (except for phpinfo())... so what we learned at university became suddenly very helpful: shell scripting!

I know this is just a piece of cruft, but it's perfect for what I needed! (eg. a regex would've been better)
This is helper function that will allow you to get the part of the string after a particular string in that string :p
First of all: WordPress fucks up the quotes so make sure you use single or double quotes where it's needed.

function after ($this, $inthat) {
 if (!is_bool(strpos($inthat, $this)))
 return substr($inthat, strpos($inthat,$this)+strlen($this));
}

Displaying the uptime of the server

(This is not the uptime of Apache but of the server!)

$data = shell_exec('uptime');

$uptime = after(' up ', $data);
$uptime = explode(',', $uptime);
 $uptime = $uptime[0].', '.$uptime[1];

echo "Uptime: $uptime";

Displaying the server load

(we used the $data variable from uptime here)

echo "Load: " . after("load average: ", $data);

Displaying the free and used memory

$data = shell_exec('free -m | grep "Mem" | sed "s/[ ]\+/ /g"');
$mem = explode(" ", $data);
echo "<tr><td class='a'><u>Memory:</u></td><td>".$mem[2]."M used / ".$mem[3]."M free</td></tr>";

shell_exec will execute the following commands:

  • free : to get the available free memory/buffers/cache/swap
  • grep : to keep only the line that displays the free memory
  • sed : to remove surplus spaces

I used the explode function in php to extract the free and used memory.

I've rly got a feeling we're starting to learn useful things at uni!