I can’t think of a scenario that this should be possible. I admit to a lot of ignorance of the process though. Could monitors be looking for the incorrect data?
Is ps the most reliable source here to tell us if something is really running?
EDIT: Would a zombie process show as running but do nothing?
I thought it was just crazyeyes198
What is causing the load, like the software used on the web site(s). If its wordpress it could be a badly programmed plugin.
I run 10 wp domains on 4gig ram with no issues.
The providers also need’s be looked at.
If it’s a problem under load, then it seems very likely to be resource starvation, like semaphores or something. Or it may be some resource limit or default that is different in different versions of PHP or different packages. We’d need to know what the limit is, so we’d need to see some errors from the PHP FPM log, probably.