Hi

Me and my friends have a website about games and stuff.
The web hotel we use clears the app-pool when it has been inactive for 15 minutes. We don't have that many users yet so this is a problem because it takes ages to load if it has been inactive.

I came up with the brilliant idea of calling the website with a script from my private server at home every 5 minutes or so. That way it would never go down.

I used some lines from another of my scripts:
wget -q -O - http://homepage.se/ > /path/to/a/file.txt
cat /dev/null > /path/to/a/file.txt

and put it in crontab.
The script runs and all and I think it's better now but we can't know for sure if it is the scripts doing. Sometimes it's just as slow as ever and I start to think the script doesn't do anything.

I've tried adding more wget-lines to fetch some different pages from the site and now running it every 3rd minute. No difference..

Does anyone know another way to call a website in a way that would solve my problems? Am I using the wrong options with wget maybe?

I've tried lynx (and piping to file) but it didn't work.

Hey there!

That approach should do nicely! Downloading a tiny file and thus keeping the site "alive"...in fact:

is the best way to describe this.
I'd do it like that myself! So...just what help (if any) did you need?

Happy gaming!

Thor

Well the site is still slow to load sometimes. So we're not sure it the script works.

So I wondered if anyone had a better solution

It depends on how the website defines "inactivity".

If it relies simply on a page call, your cron should be OK ; you could temporarily keep the result of each wget call in horodated files, for debug purposes.

But if it relies on more complex things like cookies, it is not enough. Do you know what is inactivity for your website ?

How about manually visiting the site with a web browser every few minutes, just to see if it will fix the issue?

Why not just:

?

Hmm no I don't. I'll look into it

Visiting manually does the job. Thats why I wanted to automate it.

Bash is not one of my stronger sides =)

Post #4 is key; you need to know what constitutes activity (or not ...)