AWS Server crashes

[ Moved to the Fixing WordPress sub-forum. ]

Hi, I urgently need help. My site keeps crashing. I use AWS server and they say it has do with our configuration. I need to know what is going on and why it crashes. This was their reply
One is that the WordPress/Apache resources seem to be using a lot of resources which could be due to a new plugin that was installed recently. You might consider going over recent changes to the site and code to see if there are some misbehaving plugins added which could be causing the high load on the instance.

Please note that WordPress is third-party software that AWS cannot officially support. We can only provide a best-effort to help with the software. Since I am not the most familiar with it you may consider reaching out to WordPress Support[1] for more technical depth concerning this application.

The rsync with cron is not very robust in this autoscaling environment especially if any changes happen to it. Any time there is a scale out, the jobs would have to be manually updated so the application is not stateless. I would recommend configuring a single instance to run properly by itself in a controlled environment with a small instance size (t2.micro). You could even simulate more load with beeswithmachineguns[2]. Once a single instance could handle some load, you could then launch it as a single web server as a larger instance (m4.large) for production. This would take care of the dynamic data and content and having to copy it around. To help with single instance testing environment, I noticed that if you curl or visit the public IP address of one of the web servers of this application, it will redirect to the hostname https://www.piccolouniverse.com. You may consider disabling the redirect or rewrite for testing purposes so you can directly visit the site. It might be done in the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file.

If Autoscaling is still desired to be used in this environment, I would highly recommend reviewing a couple white papers [3] [4], which explain the best-practices to implement and deploy WordPress in a stateless, scalable AWS environment. The second link refers to Elastic Beanstalk but the configuration is very similar so lots of the advice would be interchangeable. One of the suggestions is to use a WP plugin called “W3 Total Cache” which has lots of features including being able to cache user and static data on S3 rather than having to manually administer it across dynamically scaling instances[4]. This would make the environment effectively stateless which is probably would you would want for the long-term for ease of management.