Help! Server load problems with WordPress!

I still don’t understand. Most VPS setups are ‘black boxes’, you do whatever you want to in them. If you run out of VPS memory, or swap space, or CPU cycles, you run out. If you’re on a shared VPS system with ‘burstable’ resources, and there’s say 16 users on the system, each maxing out their resources, you’d just end up ‘capped’ at whatever minimum resource you should get. I’ve never heard of a VPS where they’re tracking your CPU usage as part of the overall box — what’s the point of a VPS in that setup (aside from crash-control, and chewing up more overall memory of the box’s total)?

I don’t know much about the plugins you listed. Though, again, WP-Cache should be serving up static cached pages most of the time. But I don’t know what those pages are, whether they pull in lots of other content, etc.

-d

David, I agree with you. I feel that using 2-4% of a server sometimes is fine–even if there are 100 other clients on the server. I am not “abusing” the server, either, and, MOST importantly, Westhost includes WordPress as one of its default add-ons to all VPS packages. This means that lots of their users are expected to use WordPress, and they should be able to deal with these loads.

Anyway, I will continue to monitor and see what happens with usage.

But again, there’s two underlying issues:

1. if things still seem ‘too high’, you need to look at your access logs, see what’s being hit a lot, what might be causing overhead (lots of little retrievals) versus bandwidth.

2. They’re really using VPS technology in a strange way. Looks like they have no hard caps on CPU, so it’s like a shared environment, yet each VPS runs its own email, web, sql, etc. servers, so the memory (and cpu) overhead, given less caching of code, would be significantly higher. They give you the ‘crash proof’ and ‘security’ benefits of running a VPS, but potentially not the CPU or RAM guarantees. Then again, they price it like regular shared hosting.

3. If they are running like average shared-host, they overload their boxes. But in addition, they are running VPS stuff which is that much more intensive, so overloading is a much more immediate hit (and a bigger one). If they want you under 2%, they have at least 50 users per box, likely double or triple that.

Of course, I don’t know machine specs (how much ram, how many CPUs @ what speed, what drive/raid config, are executable processes sharing ram for code for optimization, etc.), or enough about how their approach to ‘VPS hosting’ works to comment further. ??

At the end of the day, hosts set what they feel is ‘abusive’ based on their needs to load up a box. And if you’re paying $3.95 a month, can’t complain much. ??

-d

Ok, Westhost says I am now down to below 2%. Good. It seems WP-Cache is working. I will make this thread “resolved” now, and hope I don’t need to revisit this issue again. ??

At some point, send a link to the site we’ve been discussing (via my contact form on my site if you don’t want it public) — would be good to see what the ‘content level’ is like that was stressing their server so much. ??

Ok, now Westhost has disabled one of my sites again. I am at a crossroads–I have used them for many years and the site they turned off has been on their servers for about 7 years.

1) WordPress obviously does have some problems. I don’t want arguments from all of you, as I have been in this business for a long time and have worked with all the major free and paid CMS systems and WordPress needs to find a way to not eat so much CPU. It shouldn’t have a caveat that says “only use on super-duper fast computers”–it should operate just as well as other CMS in normal environments.

2) That being said, I want to continue using WP as we have invested lots of time and money into building sites around WP.

3) I am looking now for relaible servers somewhere in North America. I don’t want to use a company that has only been around for a few months–I want one that has been around for a few years. As I am in Asia, I am unfamilar with so many hosts, so I hope some of you can assist.

Tks!

If you’ve been with them for 7 years, surprised they aren’t treating you better. Then again, if you are running a fairly heavy site on an overloaded server, at $4/mo or something, well, you get what you pay for. ??

There are some major sites running WP. I don’t know what they’ve done to ‘tune’, but certainly they do ‘tune’. On a shared server, the server might be better optimized for HTML sites, not dynamic PHP sites. I also don’t know how the other CMS systems compare to WP in terms of code execution, caching, dynamicism, etc.

And, that said, I do think there needs to be a big effort launched by some of the core team to look at performance optimization for both shared and dedi servers, and a list of possible guidelines for each, PLUS some code revision to help. I personally think the code could use some performance analysis and tuning. ??

-d

I am a reseller who is paying them much, much more than US$4/mo and I am hosting lots of our company’s and our clients there… yes, I wish they were getting me better treatment, especially since I have lived through a few episodes over the years where THEY had major problems lasting for weeks on their servers (in one instance, the only gift they gave me for so much hassle was a bit more server space)… it seems like companies like that seem to forget all too easily…

So… I have decided to get a dedicated server from Westhost (about US$260/mo with all the extras) and see how that works for this site. Westhost does seem reliable, and sice I am not in the US, it’s difficult for me to understand the lay of the land there. Stick with the devil I know…

Yes, it would be good to see more core optimization in WP ??

for $260, I hope it is a NICE server, and fully managed (including security updates, firewall/intrusion stuff, etc.).

-d

Well, I didn’t go with Westhost’s server. Instead I moved the site to my own dedicated server in an IDC in my city. But WP is STILL causing problems.

Here is my current server setup:

OS: Redhat
CPU: Dual-Xeon 2.8G(3.0G)
MEM: 2GB
HD : 73GB x 2 (RAID 1)

This server is hosting one small flat-file html website that gets about 1000 pageviews a day. And it is hosting my WP site which has about 4500 pageviews.

My WP keeps causing too many coonections and is overheating my server. I am at a crossroads now and I do not want to move back to Movabletype…

Any ideas?

But WP is STILL causing problems.

Got a link?

Give me ur email address and I will send it to you. I don’t like posting my URLs on forums… I just restarted the server and cleared all connections, so it should be ok for a while. It’s 9pm in Asia and I’ve been up since 3AM with these problems so I am going to sleep now….