php-cgi.exe on VPS

[dkode]

I have a VPS running windows 2003. The main portion of my site is running on c# and is working perfectly. The problem is with php which I am using only to run phpbb.

About every 24 hours now when I login to the server there are about 15-20 php-cgi.exe processes that are not removing themselves after execution and is slowly eating all the memory on my server. Last week I logged in and there was about 40 processes running, I tried to kill them manually but they still wouldn't remove. I had to finally restart the server to get rid of the processes. 48 hours later and they are stacking up again.

Bottom line, It's been a long time since I have played with php and am curious as to how it is configured on the VPS. At first glance it seems like the VPS is running php4 and php5 along with cgi/isapi modules for both versions?

If anyone has experience with php if you could just point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it. If you have any questions about c# or .net I would be glad to help! =)

thank you!

[dkode]

now it seems as if I cannot even open a RDC or click on the server portion of plesk to administer my server. plesk tells me "system resoures exceeded"

At this point I am probably just going to disable php all together and move the forum to another box. Support told me that how php is configured is how it needs to be installed and that a custom php install would be unstable.

Has anyone else experienced this before with a VPS?

[Daniel_DBS]

I see two problems...

Windows and Plesk!



But to answer your question, no I have never had that happen to me...

[jason]

In a CGI environment, a new PHP process needs to be created each time a PHP script is run. As soon as the script finishes executing that process should end, however.

The only thing that I can think of that could possibly keep the processes alive other than buggy code (an endless loop or some such) would be persistent database connections. By design persistent connections should just close at the end of script execution when using CGI mode (in other words, simply not persist) but perhaps due to a bug or something the PHP processes aren't shuttng down because they think those DB connections are stll being used.

Just a wild guess...

--Jason

[Gwaihir]

In a CGI environment, a new PHP process needs to be created each time a PHP script is run. As soon as the script finishes executing that process should end, however.

Is this still the case with today's FastCGI systems? I know processes are ready and waiting for requests (like Apache's preforking model), but I'm not sure whether they are recycled (i.e. handling more than one script request each before ending) or not.