what is "sw-engine" used for

[Luo SijiaL]

today i observed a strange procedure in top command named sw-engine which takes me a mount of memory resource.
what makes it "strange" and "naughty" is that it turns up periodically. for instance it means for the first 4 minutes, it appears as usual, and then for the next 4 minutes it disappear (disappear from the whole list and also reflected in total number of tasks), and later it turns up again, ...just running like this.

i suppose it is related to plesk panel activity but dont have any idea on that.

what exactly does it work for?
can i stop it from periodical activity and taking my memory?

i hope that someone have ideas on it and give me some infosmation.

thx in advance.

 

[Nikolay.]

what exactly does it work for?

sw-engine* is essentially a handler that generates the Panel web pages. It is also used for many internal periodic tasks. It is usually spawned dynamically by sw-cp-server, which serves them (i.e. is a web server).

can i stop it from periodical activity and taking my memory?

Nope. At least if you need Plesk.

 

[Luo SijiaL]

really thx for you response.

my last confusion,

previously i have found that when i visiting plesk panel management panel via webpage or mobile manager, some procedure from sw-engine-cgi will come out until i log out the plesk panel.

however, when i make this observation of periodical appearance. it always be there in the way i have said.
do you think is this still the case?

 

[Nikolay.]

You might be observing two different uses:

1) Webservers often maintain a pool of handler processes and/or spawn and kill them as needed. This way, you may see some sw-engine-cgi processes with a long lifetime.

2) Since sw-engine is essentially an interpreter, it might be spawned directly as well (i.e. out of context of webserver). This way it will die as soon as the script it executes finishes.

I don't think you have anything to worry about, unless you have huge amount of (possibly orphaned) sw-engine processes (like the guy in another thread).

 

[Luo SijiaL]

strangely, in my case the situation is just contrary.

the sw-engine-cgi expires as soon as i stop visiting the plesk script.
and the sw-engine procedure always running periodically?

is that normal?

^_^ Nikolay thx you a lot

 

[Nikolay.]

Yes, it is normal