1,000s of cron jobs okay? Better way?

I want to make a free website monitoring service that pings 100s or 1,000s of web servers all day long. Which of these approaches is most sensible and efficient for my server:

1) 1 script for each server monitor called by a cron every n minutes

2) 1 script for each server monitor which runs continuously and sleeps for n minutes

3) 1 script for ALL server monitors which is somehow able to ping 100s or thousands of servers simultaneously even though any down servers will have to wait for a ping timeout.

Any other ideas? I've got a working prototype written in PHP-CLI (command line php) but I doubt that PHP-CLI is gonna be most efficient -- should I dive into C++? Would Bash or Perl or Python be any better?

Any tips or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Bump. Any thoughts at all?

option 3.

register all the sites in a database and write a perl script using Net::Ping or somesuch to do the grunt on a single cron.


christo