Many php-fpm: pool www processes running but Apache isn't

Question

I'm using CentOS 6.4 (x86) VPS with Nginx.

In Webmin Running processes table I found up to 8 "php-fpm: pool www" running processes that "Apache" is the owner, but Apache isn't running!

This consumes a lot of RAM memory. It is necessary for the nginx jobs or not? Sorry for this (stupid?) question but I'm newbie about Server management.

Thank you in advance.

Solution

The processing running will be needed and won't be being wasted.

One of the first things that should be defined in your PHP-FPM config file is what user and group PHP-FPM should be running under.

Presumably your config file says to run PHP-FPM under the user 'Apache'. You can change this to whatever you like, so long as you get the file permission right for PHP-FPM to access your php files.

However if PHP-FPM is taking up a lot of memory then you should tweak the values for the number of pools and how much memory each one can use. In particular you could reduce the settings:

pm.start_servers = 4
pm.min_spare_servers = 2

To not have as many PHP-FPM processes sitting around idle when there is no load.