Server1 display when Server2 is offline

Question

I'm just looking for the best way to approach this issue.

Issue: Server1 displays when Server2 is offline

What I've done, but I'm not happy with the result below.

PHP:

function ping ($host, $timeout = 1) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$host);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,1);
    curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    return $result;
}


$ping = ping('server2.domain.com');
if($ping==false){
  $warningText = "Server2 is not available.";
  echo "<li class='navbar-text hidden-xs'><span style='color:#d9534f;' id='warning' class='glyphicon glyphicon-warning-sign' data-toggle='tooltip' title='" . $warningText . "' data-placement='bottom'></span></li>";
}

The result is the website hangs for quite a bit while processing this ping request if the server doesn't respond at all (because it's offline).

Should I load the page and do an ajax onload, or is there another method that would work better for this?

I own both servers, they're external to eachother in a sub domain (domain.com checking server2.domain.com).

Answer 1

You could either do an AJAX request to a php script to check that or make a cronjob to check the server all 10mins (for example) (you can't directly check with a cronjob that, you have to do that with a (php) script) and save the result in a file. And in your script you're just loading the file and read what's written in there and then show either the server is online or the server isn't.