Bulk account creation

[djbob2]

Hello all,

I am running a major free web host that utilizes cPanel. We have upwards of 10,000 accounts on our server, and about one new signup every minute.

Obviously, this creates scalability issues. We have most of them covered, but there is one major issue that stands out: every time a new account is created, Apache is forced to restart. On our server, this takes a good amount of time.

We currently have account creation daemonized, ie. the new account queue is processed every ten minutes to create new accounts. This results in about a 45 second downtime every ten minutes on the server.

Are there any possible ways to make this process more efficient? We are currently considering increasing wait time (ie. from 10 minutes to an hour), but that will cause an even longer downtime every hour.

The ideal solution here would be if there was a way to create cPanel accounts in bulk. For instance, we could pass an array of information for 10 new accounts and cPanel would optimize the creation of the accounts in bulk. This would greatly increase the efficiency of my setup.

Are there any existing solutions for this situation? Are there any currently being considered? Please let me know.

Thanks,
djbob

 

[yolau]

I'm afraid that currently there is no API implementation for what you are looking for.
Your best bet would be to add a new server for the new accounts.

 

[Voltar]

This is just a thought, but is Apache doing a graceful restart or a hard restart? If you're doing graceful restarts there shouldn't be any downtime during a restart.

 

[djbob2]

Thanks for the thought Voltair! I assume that a hard restart is being done, as downtime is indeed occurring. cPanel folks: would it be cause problems if this were switched to a graceful restart?