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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T08:40:11+00:00

So I got this little snippet from a server admin saying that my script

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So I got this little snippet from a server admin saying that my script was responsible for a server overload. I didn’t quite understand how this log tells that.

Can some one explain what this output actually means ?

nobody 227949 6.2 45.4 21198032 11187052 ? S 08:40 0:19 _ /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL

user 232019 4.1 0.1 150748 25872 ? S 08:41 0:11 | _ /usr/bin/php /home/user/public_html/results.php

All I got from this was:
user processid __ ___ ___ _____ ? S ___ ___ process-location(apache/php) file-in-use

Is that even correct ? Can someone fill in the blanks explaining what’s what. And what is S ?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is output provided py ps au or ps aux, the columns are:

    USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND

    https://superuser.com/questions/117913/ps-aux-output-meaning has an explanation, or look at man ps.

    Status S means ‘sleeping’, which is quite a normal state for a process to be in. This output doesn’t really help you that much in tracking down the problem. All you now is that the problem is in results.php, so you have to investigate that more closely. I’d hazard a guess and say this script does some data processing which probably takes too long.

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