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Lots of PHP Processes

Posted by dlewis23, 12-16-2009, 11:55 AM
For some reason I am getting a lot of defunct PHP processes, I have no clue why I am getting them or even how to fix them. I have never gotten them in the past on any server. This is on a new box, and I did my config just as I normally do. I think it is causing a higher then normal server load, but I'm not sure. Does anyone have any idea of some things to try that might help stop this? I attached a screen shot of top. Thanks Attached Thumbnails
Posted by jalapeno55, 12-16-2009, 12:09 PM
defunct means the process stopped. If you want them to keep running increase the php max execution time.
Posted by fwaggle, 12-16-2009, 12:27 PM
I believe "defunct" means the process has finished, but it's parent hasn't accepted it via the wait() function (aka zombie process). To my knowledge the only resource they take up is a spot in the process table, all their RAM should be reclaimed (in fact if you look, all the "size" columns for these processes are zero) - I'm not even sure why they'd be using any CPU at all. I don't think the zombies would be directly related to your high load... However, I'd suspect a slightly broken parent to leave that many processes hanging around, and it might be what's causing the high load. Are you using suPHP, fastcgi, mod_fcgid, or how are you using PHP? Do you have anything in your logs about PHP exiting unusually? Edit: Please forgive any slight discrepancies in the information I post, I'm primarily a freebsd user and some things are different over here.
Posted by ksv2nash, 12-16-2009, 12:30 PM
Hello, have you did PHP Hardening?

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