How many can read text file at once?

An example:
A Perl script opens and reads the contents of a text file.
Say 10 people are running this script at any one time.
Script runs on our hosting co.'s FreeBSD web server.

Would each of these people have to wait in a queue for the file to opened and closed by the previous user or can they all open the file at the same time?

Cheers for any advice!
Trev

It all depends on the server resources and the actual size of the content of the file. But I'm sure more then 10 people could access and read a text file at any one given instances. It's when the file is written too, that you want to control access to the file by file locking.

Mickalo

Thanks Mickalo!

I think eventually it will get its own dedicated server and SQL if it takes off, but as long as it can deal with a few people at once to start with that should be just what I'm looking for.

Trev

One thing I didn't mention is there is a setting that controls how many parent/child processes can be spawned at one given time by a script(thru the server config files under Apache). But this usually doesn't come into pay unless the file is being access really heavily!!

If you look for a good dedicated server, you may want to check out Adgrafix Dedicated Server NT and UNIX packages!
URL: Dedicated Servers

Just had to get that plug in there, don't ya know

Cheers,

Mickalo

I'll let Claranet worry about those for now alhough hopefully we'll be able to move to SQL before it hits those rates. I'm trying to write it to be as quick and CPU friendly as possible, but I've not been learning programming all that long...



Ye' no problem, how about a couple of those $1400 Spark10 thingies - I assume at that price they are a little quicker than my AMD K6/2 400? ;-)

I'll keep you in mind...

Cheers
Trev
(who will be asking *a lot* of questions here in the near future!)