Many stalled php processes

[rexdev]

I noticed today that whenever I went to go to login as a normal user, the script would stall forever. I thought it was just my internet, so I asked a coworker to login and she experienced the same thing: the script was stalling for over an hour till she gave up.

When I did a ps aux | grep php, here is what I saw


ami      31294  0.0  0.1 235660 19496 ?        S    16:51   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31305  0.0  0.1 237484 21564 ?        S    16:51   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31358  0.0  0.1 235656 19488 ?        S    16:52   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31427  0.0  0.1 235660 19504 ?        S    16:52   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31665  0.0  0.1 235660 19496 ?        S    16:53   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31754  0.0  0.1 237484 21560 ?        S    16:54   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      31991  0.0  0.1 235656 19464 ?        S    16:55   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32025  0.0  0.1 235656 19468 ?        S    16:55   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32047  0.0  0.1 235656 19468 ?        S    16:55   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32086  0.0  0.1 235656 19464 ?        S    16:55   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32405  0.0  0.1 235656 19464 ?        S    16:57   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32486  0.0  0.1 235656 19464 ?        S    16:58   0:00 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php
ami      32734 93.3  0.1 236956 21440 ?        R    16:59  52:47 /usr/bin/php /path/to/cart/index.php

There were around 50 or so process and this site is not public yet. Could this be why the login hangs?

This is on a dedicated server with 4 CPUs and 16 GBS of ram.

The current load average is 4.91 4.61 4.44 on a server that gets around half a million page views a month and has an average load average of 0.75

So has anyone had a similar problem before? I know I can just reboot the server and kill all those old processes, but how did they get there in the first place? Also, this is a cPanel server, if it matters

Thanks for all your help!

[abantecart]

You need to check your webserver and php configuration. I assume you have an apache.

There could be many thing that can cause this.  Start with checking version for Apache and PHP

[rexdev]

Hi there,

Yes it's apache 2.2 with PHP 5.4.5 on a Centos 5 server with cPanel. Apache SuExec is on and the PHP handler is suphp.

I've run WordPress and other apps on this server, and none of them have ever stalled on me during a login.

The crazy thing is that while browsing the products it works fine. But the minute you try to login, logout, checkout, or remove something from the wish list, it freezes.

Has anyone ever encountered this problem before?

[abantecart]

I tired to google this problem and it comes up suggesting that you might have a problem with PHP/Apache compilation.

Try to update PHP to later 5.4.xx version. I think latest in this subversion is 5.4.45.