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Processes Limit

What is a Process?

Processes are the execution of a command within the server that completes a specific task, such as accessing or checking your email account and responding to a letter. This action is achieved through a series of processes that normally complete within moments of each other. The process limitation depends on the account hosting type.

This article discusses the following topics.

Concurrent Processes limitation

Shared and Reseller hosting

Shared and Reseller plans are limited to 25 simultaneous processes per cPanel. Most sites will work perfectly with a 25 concurrent processes limit. Processes open and close so quickly that they hardly ever overlap.

If a user has between 15-19 IMAP processes running, our system automatically kills any process running over 5 minutes. If more than 20 IMAP processes are running, our system will automatically kill any process running for longer than 2 minutes.

SSH access is limited to two simultaneous connections on Shared and Reseller plans.

Any cron jobs configured will require one of these sessions to be available to run since cron jobs run under the same shell as SSH.

VPS and Dedicated hosting

VPS and Dedicated hosting plans allow for an adjustable number of simultaneous processes with no enforced limit.

To monitor your server's processes and CPU usage, you will need to use SSH and run the top command. For more information, please visit the following article.

Mail client exceeding Processes limit

If you exceed the processes limit, this could be caused by your mail client (Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Outlook, etc.) checking for emails too many times in an hour.

Mail Policy

Per our email policy, most of our servers have a limit of 30 POP3/IMAP checks per hour per IP address.

Once the limit is reached, the server stores the check as a process to be handled after the 30 checks reset; however, more requests from your mail client keep coming. Therefore, more and more processes are stored until the 25 process limits are reached, bringing your site down with a 500 error message.

How to determine if your email client is the problem

Try the steps below to determine if your mail client is causing your website to exceed the processes limits.

  1. Close the email client to clear all the processes. You will then be able to see the site load back up right away.
  2. After seeing the site pull back up, open the client, and locate the setting for how often your mail client checks the server for emails. The setting should not be less than 10 minutes apart.

If you are still hitting the process limit, you either have too much traffic for a Shared server, or you need to optimize your database for faster queries.

Apple/Mac users: On most Apple devices, there is a function called push which, when enabled, keeps the connection to our server open and continually checks mail. This consequently creates many IMAP processes and will eventually conflict with our Terms of Service.
Please contact us via phone or chat for a proper assessment of the issue.

VPS or Dedicated server is limiting me to 25 processes

This number can be increased at your discretion by making changes in the following file: /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/pre_main_global.conf

To make the appropriate changes, use the command line:

RLimitNPROC 25 30
  1. Change the first number to the new limit (in the command above, it is 25).
  2. Add 5 to get the second number (in the command above, 30).
  3. Restart Apache (location: /etc/init.d/httpd, command: restart).

After Apache is restarted, you should be able to see the new process limit functioning accordingly.