There are several different server processes that constantly run in Couchbase Server whether or not the server is actively handling reads/writes or handling other operations from a client application. Right after you start up a node, you may notice a spike in CPU utilization, and the utilization rate will plateau at some level greater than zero. The following describes the ongoing processes that are running on your node:
erl.exe: This process is specific to Windows and is handles operations.
beam.smp: This will index items, handle ongoing XDCR replications, and manage cluster operations.
memcached: This process is responsible for caching items in RAM and persisting them to disk.