By default, if you are running multiple agents, each agent automatically launches its own Java proxy to communicate with the controller.
However, if you are running multiple PHP Agents on the same machine, you can reduce your overhead by setting up the agents to report to a single shared or multi-tenant proxy. In this case, you would need to start that proxy manually.
The number of nodes that can report to a single proxy is limited by the size of the heap given to the proxy. You may need to adjust the maxHeapSize and maxPermSize settings in the runproxy script if you have a large number of agents reporting to a single proxy.
Setting up a Multi-Tenant Proxy
Configure each agent for manual launch of the proxy. To do this, in the PHP configuration file—php.ini or appdynamics_agent.ini depending on your setup—for each agent, set the agent.auto_launch_proxy value to 0.
Configure a single proxy control directory for all the agents that will share the proxy. They must all be on the same machine. To do this, in the PHP configuration file for each agent, set agent.proxy_ctrl_dir to the same proxy control directory. The permissions on this directory should be readable and executable by the process that runs Apache and writable by the process that runs the proxy.
Before you start the agents, arrange to launch the proxy manually, passing the proxy control directory configured in step 2 as the proxyCommunicationDir argument to the runProxy script. See information on executing the runProxy in Start the PHP Agent Proxy Manually. AppDynamics recommends launching the proxy on system startup.
Verify that each agent reporting to the multi-tenant proxy is configured with a unique app_name/node_name combination. The app_name and node_name are arguments to the agent install script.