Question

Php running twice (two processes), one of which under root

Posted June 5, 2015 2.7k views
Linux Basics PHP System Tools

Hey there,

First off, I am a newbie but am putting a lot of heart at searching/learning/understanding. The DO Community has been a tremendous help so far :)
Here’s a problem I can’t solve because I’m not sure where to start.

While reviewing the running processes on my droplet (Ubuntu), I noticed that two instances of php5-fpm are running, one under my expected www-data user, one under root.

First, I’d like to understand why this root instance is here. Second, although it’s eating up a tiny amount of memory, it’s still significant on my 512MB droplet.

My questions:

  • is it normal, expected or usual?
  • what steps can I take to identify what launches the extra php5, if it’s not desirable?

Precisions:

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Sylvain2008
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3 answers
eldin June 6, 2015

@Sylvain2008 some parts of PHP need to be run as root to work properly without these permission PHP would not work, e.g. a connection between PHP and Nginx (to explain it in the easiest way).

I have 3 PHP processes :-).

And thank you, it is my pleasure to help.

PS: You can use Linux Dash, it is really good : https://github.com/afaqurk/linux-dash

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eldin June 5, 2015

Welcome to DigitalOcean,

here are some basics of Linux (Ubuntu) : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal

Everything with PHP sounds normal, some stuff needs to be run as root.

MySQL has a high RAM usage and 512MB are enough for the beginning.

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Sylvain2008 June 5, 2015

Hi eldin,

Thank you for taking the time to answer and providing me with this link. The shortcuts section will be particularly useful, I really appreciate.

I’ll dig in deeper about this, I get why there’s a php5 process running as www-data because I asked for it and configured it to be like this.

I’m more annoyed about the other process that comes out of the blue and am looking at understanding why it’s there (triggered by a cron, spawned by nginx, whatever).

Knowledge about this will come in its time, I guess :) Thanks again!

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