Identical mysql processes

Is it common to have about a dozen identical mysql processes running? It is using a lot of memory, and was just curious if this was a normal amount or not. Thank you.

Those are threads, not processes and yes, it's perfectly normal for MySQL to have many threads running. The memory listed is the total for all of them. You will most likely find that if you added them all up, they would come to more memory than you actually have.

If you hit F5 in htop you will see that they all have a single parent. You will also see that there is only one mysqld process in top and ps -ef. You can see all the threads with ps -eLf.

The threads you are seeing actually give away something inherant about the mysqld process.

• Source-compiled versions of mysqld generate visible processes
• RPM-based installations of mysqld only show one thread in the process list

As expressed by Ladadadada, it is normal and you have nothing to worry about.