Understanding The WHM Process Manager

If you notice that your server starts to perform slower, or has trouble keeping up with the traffic to your site, usually this will be due to memory intensive processes. In some cases, this may be related to a normal cPanel / WHM Process or even a cPanel User / site on the server. With WHM’s Process Manager, you can view the processes running on the server, as well as the user running them. You also have the ability to kill all of a user’s processes, or kill individual processes.

Where To Find The Process Manager

Step One: Log into your WHM Administrative Dashboard.

Step Two: In the Upper Left there will be a search box. Enter in “System Health“, and hit enter. From the list of available options, select Process Manager.

Step Three: After you click on Process Manager, you will be brought to a new page that will list the processes running on the server and brief information about them.

WHM System Health Process Manager Default Example Page

Overview of a Process

Each process will have some information regarding the process. This includes the Process ID (Pid), Owner of the process running, Priority of the task, CPU being used by the Process, Memory being used by the Process, and the Command that is running for the Process.

Performing A Trace of the Process

With the WHM Process Manager, you can see the output of a process or task as it runs. This can be helpful for debugging an issue, or seeing what output is being produced by a process out of curiosity. To perform a Trace on a process, simply click on the Trace link next to the process. This will produce output from the process, starting from the point you started to trace the process.

WHM System Health Process Manager Trace Example

Killing A Single Process

If you notice a script or process running that seems to be bogging down your server, and you are sure that it can be killed, WHM offers the ability to easily kill the process. To do this, you would simply click the Kill link next to the process in the Process Manager that you would like killed. Afterwards, this will redirect you to a page indicating the Kill was successful.

WHM System Health Process Manager Kill Process Complete Example

Killing A User’s Processes

If you see that a particular user is abusing the resources, or causing a high load on the server due to all of their processes consuming a large amount of resources, you can Kill all of the processes that belong to that user.

Step One: From the top of the Process Manager page, there will be a drop down with a list of users. Select the User that you would like to kill processes for in the list.

WHM System Health Process Manager Kill User Processes Example

Step Two: Once you have selected the user that you want to Kill processes for, click the Blue Kill user’s processes button.

Step Three: After WHM has killed all of the processes belonging to the user, you will be brought to a page that is similar to if a single process was killed, indicating the user’s processes have been killed.

WHM System Health Process Manager Kill User Processes Successful Example

Background Process Killer Overview in WHM – How you can set to automatically kill processes related to IRC Bots / Servers.
Checking Service Status Within WHM – How to check the status of various cPanel / WHM Related Applications
Definition of WHM Functions – A brief overview of the various actions that can be performed within WHM.

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