High Server CPU Usage

[digitalrefresh]

Hello

I understand this question gets asked several times but I'm struggling to find any concrete understanding of causes, all I can find are articles which discuss tweaking to certain server settings but nothing specific, just generalised information.

Every so often my process manager in my two servers overloads CPU usage with lots of simultaneous processes running taking up the CPU.

They appear as below:
/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/bin/php-cgi
php-fpm: pool insertdomainname_uk

Each of these take up between 10-25% CPU usage and then after a while, between 20 mins to an hour the usage dies down.

Could someone help me understand why they all run at the same time to generate such high CPU usage? (also what do they mean? They are not related to server traffic across my domains as I've checked this)

I've been reading this article found in another support thread - PHP-FPM Performance Tuning Basics

This article refers to reducing or editing the number of max children or processes to be spawned my a single domain, but I can't find any information on only allowing the server to process one at a time. Also is there a way to find out the current allowances before submitting command prompts to change settings?

Many thanks for any help.

William.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there!

but I'm struggling to find any concrete understanding of causes

That sounds about right - there are so many different causes of server load that there will never be one guide that will solve the issue.

The first process you mention is pretty generic and is just letting you know that some process using PHP 7.2 is taking up resources.

The second process mentioned does indicate a specific user account, so that user must have a lot of PHP processes running at the same time.

The Process Manager tool in WHM is great, but if you're looking at this in real-time I'd recommend checking the "top -c" command directly over SSH so you can see how these come and go in real-time. For example, it would be odd to me if the same PHP process with the same PID existed for twenty minutes to an hour, as you have experienced. On most machines, pressing Shift+P will sort the processes by CPU usage, and Shift + M will sort by memory.

Watching them change in real-time may give you a different perspective on what is happening with the system.