30 March 2013, 4:25

Single XEON Quad Core 2.5ghz

LAMP Ubuntu 12.04.2 on top of Hyper-V 2008 R2

2GB of RAM assigned to this server

Nothing special or extra from what's required to run Mahara is on the server

top shows 12 php COMMAND processes are running with CPU% ranging from 31 to 40%

no users are logged in. please advise.

30 March 2013, 4:46

I should mention a reboot fixed the problem temorarily, then it re-occurs after 24 hours?

I don't have a cron task running yet, could that be the issue?

01 April 2013, 18:04

Hello Eric,

What version of Mahara are you using and which database (PostgreSQL or MySQL) do you run it on?

Do you have any entries in the error or access log although no users are logged in? Did you install any plugins or custom code?

Cheers

Kristina

02 April 2013, 10:28

What's the max_execution_time setting in your php.ini file? If you don't have a cron job set up, and you don't have any logged-in users, it's pretty strange that there are so many PHP threads running.

If your max_execution_time is set to 0 (no limit) then it's possible what you're seeing is extremely long-running page requests that were requested by users who have sinced logged out. How big is your site (i.e., how many users, how many Pages). In one of our biggest sites (90,000 users, 275,000 Pages), I've noticed a couple of pages that take hours to load unless you tweak your database settings. Of course, in that case it's hanging on the database, not PHP, so it wouldn't be PHP processes at the top.

Cheers,
Aaron