Understanding PHP-FPM's process manager (by actually watching it)

I thought I understood pm = dynamic until I sat down and watched it work in real time. It turns out the whole process manager is one tiny loop, and once you see the loop, every number in fpm-status suddenly makes sense. This is what I learned, with real outputs from a real server. The config pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 300 ; hard ceiling on total workers pm.start_servers = 5 ; workers created at boot pm.min_spare_servers = 5 ; never fewer than 5 idle pm.max_