Can I throttle the max CPU usage of a php script?

Question

I have some scripts that use a ton of cpu is it possible to cap the amount of cpu a process is allowed to use? I am running on CentOs 5.5 by the way.

Answer 1

PHP is considered a scripting language, and does not have such low level access to the hardware.

Instead, what you can do is use functions like "set_time_limit()"

http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-time-limit.php

and memory_limit in your php.ini

http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php

Those are the recommended methods, but the closest you'll get to what you want are probably a combination of "sleep()"

http://php.net/manual/en/function.sleep.php

and getting the current CPU load with "exec('uptime');". Note that you may or may not have access to those system commands.