Adjusting PHP5-FPM child processes (Apache)

Every now and then, on a clients server, we get the following dreaded message:


WARNING: [pool www] seems busy (you may need to increase pm.start_servers, or pm.min/max_spare_servers), spawning 16 children, there are 4 idle, and 48 total children

So we will start off, by determining the non-swapped physical memory usage by each PHP5-FPM processes (notice its in kilo Bytes)

ps -ylC php5-fpm --sort:rss
ps --no-headers -o "rss,cmd" -C php5-fpm | awk '{ sum+=$1 } END { printf ("%d%s\n", sum/NR/1024,"M") }'

Thereafter I ran the following command to give me the total memory, of my current PHP5-FPM configuration.

ps -ylC php5-fpm --sort:rss | awk '!/RSS/ { s+=$8 } END { printf "%s\n", "Total memory used by PHP-FPM child processes: "; printf "%dM\n", s/1024 }'

In my case I still had plenty of RAM left.

Remember the appropriate value for pm.max_children can be calculated as:

pm.max_children = Total RAM of your server / Max child process size - in my case it was 67MB

pm.max_children = 70
pm.start_servers = 20
pm.min_spare_servers = 20
pm.max_spare_servers = 35
pm.max_requests = 500