There are quite a few separate issues being discussed in this thread. Can you elaborate?
If you have a site which is hitting the nproc limit with very low traffic, the other possibility is that it has malware and it's doing something nefarious with every request. Try (as root) attaching strace to one of the PHP processes.
strace -s 2048 -f -p 12345
The -s flag sets the limit of the string length that will be printed. The -f flag will follow any child processes that are spawned.
Where 12345 is the pid of the process you want to examine.