[Bug]: datadog-ipc-helper as a service and needrestart about dd-trace-php HOT 3 OPEN

Hey @moerkey,

the correct parent process of datadog-ipc-helper would be systemd itself, being pid 1; i.e. that's what happens when a process is daemonized (forks itself twice and kills the first fork).

Systemd thinks the datadog-ipc-helper belongs to php8.0-fpm.service as both share the same cgroup, given that a php-fpm process is starting it.

I'm not sure why systemd puts the datadog-ipc-helper into /system.slice/salt-minion.service for you though, after the original cgroup terminates.

As far as I have researched, it doesn't seem to be possible to put the datadog-ipc-helper into another cgroup (generally) as the fpm and apache processes are running as www-data, but nearly everything needs root and it's not like there's an user session active for www-data either, which could inherit it.

I am not sure what or whether we're able to do about this.

The process can currently be disabled by disabling telemetry, but for example ASM also relies on that telemetry, and in future more things will be sent through it.

from dd-trace-php.

Hey @bwoebi,

thank you for the explanation. At first, I would fix that the process does not run as root (user who installed the app) after an installation or update of Datadog PHP tracer. It should run as www-data right? Currently, I need to reboot the system that it runs as this user.

Out of curiosity. How does the process start itself, or who starts it?
And where is the binary? I could not find it on disk.

Cheers

from dd-trace-php.

It does not matter as which user the daemon runs, and can be communicated with by any user over its shared memory unix socket.
It simply is spawned by the first php process, i.e. the first time php with the extension code is executed.

from dd-trace-php.