System Processes

[Chris]

Thought I'd ask the question. In looking in Virtuozzo under System Processes I have several duplicate processes running. Should duplicates be running or should I kill them off?

Examples:

/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -DSSL - 10 instances; user nobody
/usr/sbin/named -u named - 6 instances; user named
/usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/ --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/lib/mysql/myhostname.com.pid --skip-locking - 10 instances; user mysql
spamd child - 5 instances; user root


Thanks in advanced for your help!!

[Robert]

Hi Chris!

It's perfectly normal to have multiple copies of the server processes running, especially with Apache, mySQL, Bind. What happens is that one instance of the program cannot always handle several requests if they come in all at once.

Lets say your VPS gets 200 requests suddenly... instead of one copy of Apache handling them one by one, you could have 5-10 copies of Apache running that gets the work done 5-10 times sooner.

Most of the time when these processes are not actually serving pages and working, they'll just be idle and not use CPU power (they do still use a bit of memory however). It's a bit of a balencing act to determine exactly how many child proccesses to leave running. If the VPS is getting a LOT of requests, increasing the spare/child servers can help. If you only will ever at most a couple people online, it might be safe to knock back the spare/childs back a bit.

Generally though the default settings should be OK. Feel free to open a support ticket though if you notice very high resource useage. We can look at the useage and try to optimize things a bit.

In most cases, it's not the extra processes that will get you... it will be things like CPanel's 2 chat programs (entropychat and melange) along with SpamAssassin (by default it has about 5 child processes... I generally suggest 2-3).

You can limit SpamAssassin in CPanel by going to WHM, clicking on Addon Modules, and adding the spamdconf module. Reload WHM (so the left frame refreshes) and at the bottom of the left side should be an option that says "Setup Spamd Startup Configuration". Set "Maximum Children" to 2 or 3 and save.

And like I mentioned earlier... if you notice high system resource useage, just open a support ticket and ask us to take a poke around.