Thread Locking In Magento?

Question

We just had about 20 httpd processes that were sitting there chewing CPU for over 20 minutes, I am wondering why something like that might happen....

Any ideas are greatly appreciated because I am confused, a quick restart of apache, and the processes never came back.

Answer 1

strace the processes to get a clue about what they are doing

strace -ftttp PID

Replace PID with the process ID as necessary.

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Restating Apache should be a last resort. Those processes could have been callbacks from a payment gateway, customers placing orders etc.

Unless you know it's not genuine load, you shouldn't kill anything.