There are a number of ways to check the status of a Challenger server.

Logs
Regular surveillance of the logs is of course important to detect unusual events and errors.

CPU and Memory Usage
Keeping an eye on CPU and memory usage of Challenger's Pike process is always good. A major increase of CPU or memory usage is often worth investigating.

On a Unix system, the commands ps or top can be helpful. It is, however, worth noticing that the memory usage reported by those commands is not always entirely relevant, since some of it can be caused by memory mapped files.

Challenger's own idea of how much memory it uses can be found under the Development/Debug information for developers action (it will appear only if More options has been selected).

Status and Debug Info
For every virtual server there is a page in the configuration interface, Status and debug information, showing how busy that virtual server is.

Access Requests
The number of requests for the server is showed in the Status/Access request status action. If the server has been unusually busy, the access logs for the virtual servers will tell why. This is best done with a log analyzer tool, such as Roxen LogView.

The Status actions show information about:

Access / request status

Shows the amount of data handled since last restart.

Current FTP sessions

Lists all active FTP sessions and what files they are currently transferring.

Extended process status

Shows detailed process status on Solaris and Linux.

List Available Fonts...

Lists all available fonts.

Open files

Shows a list of all open files.

Pipe system status

Shows the number of data shuffling channels.

Process status

Shows various information about the pike process.

Thread status

Shows various information about the threads in Challenger.

Caches
The Cache/Cache status action shows how well the built in caches in Challenger are working.