Question about Max Idle Time

[garnser]

Hi all, I was reading up a bit on the documentation and stubled upon the following:

"Max Idle Time
Description: Specifies the maximum idle time before an external application is stopped by the server. When set to -1, the external application will not be stopped by the server. Default value is -1. This feature allows resources used by idle applications to be freed. It is especially useful in mass hosting environment when you need to define many applications running in setuid mode for the sake of maximum security."

The infrastructure I'm responsible for intends to host several thousands websites and given the recommendation to turn this in in this case I was wondering what syntax that should be used, is it specified per minute or with another kind of variable?

Thanks

 

[mistwang]

It is number of seconds.
If PHP suEXEC is used, each account get a few dedicate PHP processes, this should be set to a couple seconds, like 10 or 5 seconds. Other wise, there will be too much PHP processes running and consume too much system resource by idle PHP processes.