Ubuntu PHP Bug

Image via Wikipedia

I upgraded a couple of servers to the latest version of Ubuntu a couple of days ago and noticed something really odd when checking the running processes post-upgrade.

For some bizarre reason there were literally thousands of “fuser” processes running.

Odd, but I didn’t think too much of it, as they disappeared after a reboot .. or so I thought ..

This morning I discovered that they’d come back with a vengeance and were eating CPU and RAM – rendering a relatively powerful machine pretty much useless.

A bit of searching led to this thread on the Ubuntu user forums.

There’s also a bug open with Ubuntu – though they still haven’t fixed it 🙁

In the meantime it can be “fixed” by reverting the php5 cronjob to the one that was in previous versions of Ubuntu.