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The sw-engine process causes high CPU usage on a Plesk server

Plesk for Linux kb: technical

Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux

Symptoms

The sw-engine process causes high CPU usage:

# ps aux | grep sw-engine
root 1242 0.0 0.3 348136 28732 ? Ss Jan14 0:14 /usr/bin/sw-engine -
/usr/local/psa/admin/conf/php.ini /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/modules/watchdog/wdcollect -c /usr/local/psa/etc/modules/watchdog/wdcollect.inc.php
root 2315 0.0 0.1 353260 9908 ? Ss Jan14 0:00 sw-engine-fpm: master process (/etc/sw-engine/sw-engine-fpm.conf)
root 3136 0.0 0.3 363840 32028 ? S Jan14 1:00 /usr/bin/sw-engine -c /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/php.ini /usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/psa-health-monitor-notification.php

Plesk may fail to load with a 502 error.

Cause

Some sw-engine child processes are stuck and cannot be stopped normally.

Resolution

  1. Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

  2. Stop the sw-engine service:

    # service sw-engine stop
    Stopping sw-engine-fpm: [ OK ]

  3. Find stuck sw-engine processes and their PID:

    # ps aux | grep sw-engine
    psaadm 1597 0.0 2.1 274896 44100 ? Ss 12:39 0:00 /usr/bin/sw-engine -c /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/php.ini /usr/local/psa/admin/plib/WebSocket/bin/ws-server.php
    psaadm 1842 0.0 2.3 278952 49564 ? S 12:42 0:00 /usr/bin/sw-engine -c /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/php.ini /usr/local/psa/bin/extension --exec revisium-antivirus ra_executor.php

  4. Kill these stuck processes using their PID. In the example above, they are 1597 and 1842:

    # kill -9 1597 1842

  5. Start the sw-engine service:

    # service sw-engine start
    Starting sw-engine-fpm: [ OK ]

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Comments

2 comments
Date Votes
  • Any permanent fix to that? After doing so 24h later same issue again.

    0
  • Update on our old Ubuntu 22 LTS server who was affected by this issue.
    The permanent fix was to disable the SEO Toolkit Extension afterwards we never had this issue any more.

    0

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