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Asked: 2026-06-02T23:16:37+00:00

How do I spawn a specific number of processes in Apache when using mod_wsgi

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How do I spawn a specific number of processes in Apache when using mod_wsgi with the WSGIDaemonProcess setting?

I have my VirtualHost setup with the following (as a test):

WSGIDaemonProcess webserver user=webserver group=webserver processes=24 threads=8 display-name=%{GROUP} python-path=/var/virtualenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages

While my httpd.conf is setup as follows:

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers       8
MinSpareServers    1
MaxSpareServers    8
ServerLimit       24
MaxClients        24
MaxRequestsPerChild  4000
</IfModule>

Note, that I’m running a very constrained 256MB server with PostgreSQL database installed as well.

However, system shows far more than 24 processes for apache (more than 30). I expected that if I set the ServerLimit to the same as processes in WSGIDaemonProcess it would run at the constant 24. However, there seems to be a bunch of spare processes running for unknown reasons?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The ServerLimit directive has got nothing to do with mod_wsgi daemon mode. The ‘processes’ option to WSGIDaemonProcess is what specifies how many daemon processes mod_wsgi will create. It is a static number and not a dynamic number so just set it to how many you need. For that number of threads per process, there is no point setting it to more that ‘processes=3’ to start with as you are limited to 24 concurrent requests in the Apache child worker processes which proxy requests to the mod_wsgi daemon processes, so not possible to handle any more requests than that.

    In general, if you are running in a memory constrained environment, then you should not be using prefork MPM but worker MPM. Is there a reason you must, such as needing to run PHP code as well? If not, change the MPM used.

    How else you could configure things really depends on your code, response times and request throughput, which only you know.

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