I am running Vaultwarden in Docker on a Raspberry Pi 4B on Raspberry Pi OS 13.6 ‘trixie’ (arm64), behind an nginx reverse proxy. Is it normal for Vaultwarden to be continually spawning new processes/threads/workers and terminating them? I only noticed this behaviour today when I was upgrading Docker and it had restarted Vaultwarden with a curiously high PID count. I opened up htop to see Vaultwarden processes starting and terminating every couple seconds. I only have 3 users accessing Vaultwarden sporadically (a couple times a day).
I am running the latest image (sha256:ebdfe7070...). I don’t believe this had happened in previous versions of Vaultwarden, but I haven’t looked too closely.
Here’s a diff of running pstree -p twice, 30 seconds apart. You can see (at least) 1 /vaultwarden thread had terminated and 1 started.
--- pstree.a 2026-08-10 10:53:56.906447952 +0000
+++ pstree.b 2026-08-10 10:54:26.794184569 +0000
@@ -76,23 +76,23 @@
|-containerd-shim(1770206)-+-vaultwarden(1770297)-+-{vaultwarden}(1770513)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770514)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770516)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770555)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770556)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770557)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770563)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1770567)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1772678)
- | | |-{vaultwarden}(1780176)
| | |-{vaultwarden}(1780349)
- | | `-{vaultwarden}(1780524)
+ | | |-{vaultwarden}(1780524)
+ | | `-{vaultwarden}(1780768)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770212)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770213)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770214)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770215)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770216)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770233)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770235)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770236)
| |-{containerd-shim}(1770242)
| `-{containerd-shim}(1771038)
Any insight on whether this is normal will be appreciated. Thanks for your assistance!