You logged into cPanel and noticed a few things in red on the right hand side and are wondering... what is this?
A process is a action or task that is running under a user that adds up concurrently. In our shared servers, the cPanel's are limited to 80 PHP scripts running concurrently (Entry Processes) and 120 processes in general in any combination php, cron, website opening, checking email, etc.
While these limits are set, our ToS and Acceptable Use Policies does not mean you can concurrently run them all at the same time. Processes, entry or regular, should only take a fraction of a second to run and close. When a site is not properly optimized, these processes can stack and cause problems with not just the server, but with your site as well.
Should you ever want to look more into the issues of your site. You can check your processes and site health in 3 different ways.
- We recommend running your site through GTMETRIX. While we are not site developers and will do everything we can to help, we will always want to check here either: https://gtmetrix.com/ or https://experte.com/pagespeed
Majority of issues come from no caching on your site. If you are running WordPress, we recommend CloudFlare and W3 Total Cache. If your site is NOT WordPress, we recommend CloudFlare and Gzip Compression which can be activated in your cPanel > Software Section > Optimize Website > Compress All Content > Update Settings.
- You can check in your cPanel > Metrics > Resource Usage. From here, you can see when the issue is happening, what is causing it, and have a general idea of what needs to be addressed to fix it.
- You can check through your own cPanel terminal using the TOP command. You can also get more detailed information by running: watch "ps aux"
With this command, you will be able to see the file that is running causing the build up in processes. If you see index.php over and over, typically that is because the site is taking too long to load and needs caching.