Many httpd process run by Nobody user

Question

Our VPS is running CentOS, 1GB memory, 3CPUs WHM/cpanel installed. We are running wordpress website. We got internal server error.

top

 2114 mysql     20   0 1849m  30m 2900 S  3.3  3.0   1:46.34 mysqld             
31344 root      20   0  155m 4876  912 S  0.7  0.5   0:43.55 lfd - sleeping     
 6025 nobody    20   0 69760 2804 1776 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.05 httpd              
 6052 nobody    20   0 69792 2916 1780 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.03 httpd              
 6062 nobody    20   0 69828 3000 1876 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.03 httpd              
 6079 nobody    20   0 69828 3028 1876 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.03 httpd              
 6090 nobody    20   0 69768 3044 1916 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.10 httpd              
 6096 nobody    20   0 69788 3088 1908 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.08 httpd              
 6113 nobody    20   0 69780 3004 1888 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.05 httpd              
 6115 nobody    20   0 69788 2988 1888 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.03 httpd              
 6132 nobody    20   0 69832 3056 1920 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.02 httpd              
 6135 nobody    20   0     0    0    0 Z  0.3  0.0   0:00.02 httpd <defunct>    
 6144 nobody    20   0 69768 2876 1804 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.04 httpd              
 6149 nobody    20   0 69780 2964 1824 S  0.3  0.3   0:00.04 httpd              

Any reason why there are many httpd run by nobody?

Solution

Your Apache HTTPd server is running in prefork mode what means that a single control process is responsible for launching child processes which listen for connections and serve them when they arrive.

Those are the many httpd processes you can see.

Then in your Apache HTTPd configuration file, you may find a User directive instructing the server to run as the nobody user. Since the nobody user can have other uses on the system, this is not always desirable to use it as well to serve Web pages. It is better to create a dedicated user for this purpose.

Comments

[HopelessN00b]

Administration panels are off topic. Even the presence of an administration panel on a system, because they take over the systems in strange and non-standard ways, making it difficult or even impossible for actual system administrators to manage the servers normally, and tend to indicate low-quality questions from users with insufficient knowledge for this site.

[Safado]

By default, the Apache build that ships with CentOS creates an Apache user and uses it like Spack has suggested. So this "nobody" server is most likely something your hosting provider has concocted. You should probably read through any documentation your hosting provider has cooncerning their custom web server builds. While Spack's scenario is ideal, they've customized it for a reason. And if you go and change that, you may end up breaking something due to permission issues, like cpanel.