How can I limit the number of child processes that MySQL spawns?

Question

Is there a way to limit the number of children than mysqld spawns? Or should one not worry about that? My VPS only has 512MB of RAM.

Here's the output of htop, after I set max_connections to 6 and restarted the mysql service:

  PID USER     PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S CPU% MEM%   TIME+  Command
27082 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.41  `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27121 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.05  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27099 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.23  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27097 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27096 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27095 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27094 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.02  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27093 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.01  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27091 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27090 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27089 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld
27088 mysql     20   0  136M 28868  5800 S  0.0  5.7  0:00.00  |   `- /usr/sbin/mysqld

I've installed MySQL using aptitude.

$ aptitude search '~i'
i A mysql-client-5.1                                                                - MySQL database client binaries
i A mysql-client-core-5.1                                                           - MySQL database core client binaries
i A mysql-common                                                                    - MySQL database common files, e.g. /etc/mysql/my.cnf
i   mysql-server                                                                    - MySQL database server (metapackage depending on the latest version)
i A mysql-server-5.1                                                                - MySQL database server binaries and system database setup
i A mysql-server-core-5.1                                                           - MySQL database server binaries

Answer 1

I don't know exactly what those child processes are, but I believe that they are nothing to worry about.

Your htop reading shows that /usr/sbin/mysqld is using 136 MB of RAM total (from the VIRT field). The child processes are not using any more noticeable amount of RAM. 136 MB may seem like a lot, but MySQL is naturally demanding for memory.

If you think that CPU usage is a concern, it shouldn't be. The TIME+ field shows little usage of any of the mysqld processes.

I once had a VPS with 512 MB of RAM, too. It was my poor choice of software that led me to running out of RAM—I tried running multiple virtual servers with Virtualmin. 512 MB isn't much, and virtualization solutions like OpenVZ don't let you swap anything out to disk, so watch out for other factors that could increase your RAM usage.