We are looking at the behaviour of our system. We have noticed some unexpected behaviour in RabbitMQ and this is causing us to look at nova-api.

In our system, we see that we have 73 nova-api processes, one parent and 72 child processes and we believe that this has been slowly but steadily increasing over the space of a couple of months. If we stop the service and restart it, we get the same number of processes.

Surprisingly, osapi_compute_workers in nova.conf is 24 - we would have expected that this meant that the number of nova-api processes would peak at around this value.

So, my questions are:

• is 73 nova-api processes common/typical (yes, a bit of a 'how long is a piece of strong', I know)
• should the osapi_compute_workers parameter control the number of nova-api processes

We are running Icehouse installed with Mirantis Fuel 5.1.