Can "active processes" be larger than "max_children" for PHP-FPM - php

Question

Having set the pool to static with max_children to 5 I would expect the metric "active processes" to be 5 or below. Sending 10 concurrent requests will have "active processes" report more than 5 (e.g. 10, 12, 25, ...).
Is this valid behaviour?
Pool configuration:
# grep -v ";" /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf | grep -Ev "^$"
[www]
user = www-data
group = www-data
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
pm = static
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 3
pm.process_idle_timeout = 10s
pm.max_requests = 500
pm.status_path = /status
ping.response = pong
slowlog = log/$pool.log.slow
request_slowlog_timeout = 0
request_terminate_timeout = 0
Expected result:
Metric "active processes" from /status should be below 5.
Actual result:
Metric "active processes" from /status is above 5.

Answer 1

According to the PHP FPM documentation when pm is set to static the only setting that determines the number of child processes is pm.max_children. As you expect, that should determine the start and max number.
A couple things to consider:
After changing the configuration did you restart both PHP-FPM and NGINX ? Something like:
sudo service php-fpm5 restart
sudo service nginx restart
Is it possible you are altering the wrong config file (perhaps one that is in the wrong path?). You might try changing some other value and confirm that it is affecting the web server as intended.
Is it possible that you have multiple pools configured and that the /status page is giving you a report for multiple pools.