High Resource Usage (CPU and Physical Memory), 500 Server Error

  • I’m using several plugins for building my property listing website, built with Elementor.

    CPT (Custom Post Types) and ACF (advanced custom fields) which are used to populate the individual listings [Elementor’s dynamic tags to retrieve the ACF fields].

    Am also using facetwp and SearchWP for creating the ‘search/filter page’.

    I started to get a 500 internal server error recently, which I believe is caused by hitting the resource usage.

    I tried to recreate the error and this shows the spike (almost hitting 100%) in the CPU and Physical Memory usage (image link) when i am creating the page.

    I tried to simulate having 1 visitor on my page and this is the usage (image link).

    A few questions:
    1) is a 1GB physical memory ‘sufficient’?
    2) are all the above resource usage normal?
    3) if so, what can I do to prevent the 500 server error? (am planning to run ads to increase traffic, but no point having a website that crashes)
    4) if not, then what should i do to reduce the resource usage?

    Some other related questions:
    1) does the number of plugins installed matter? and how many plugins installed is considered too much? I have 34 installed on my site

    thanks in advance!

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Yui. Reason: not a development topic
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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  • Moderator Yui

    (@fierevere)

    永子

    1) is a 1GB physical memory ‘sufficient’?

    when running on a VPS – no,
    on a shared hosting you can fit, however its not guranteed that things will run smooth under load spikes.

    2) are all the above resource usage normal?

    dependent on your plugin set/theme
    each page generation consumes 50 ms and up to 500+ ms on a single core 3000 Mhz CPU, memory usage can vary per server setup.

    3) if so, what can I do to prevent the 500 server error

    Error 500 happens when your server is not using correct configuration
    i.e. unsupported directives in .htaccess
    or error parsing PHP script (program error) It has nothing to do with resource limits.
    However:
    error 504 can be returned when backend (PHP) processing is timed out
    error 503 can be returned on hitting resource limits.

    4) if not, then what should i do to reduce the resource usage?

    Generally, things like transients cache (Redis or Memcached) can help with decreasing load and improve performance, without negative impact on other things.

    1) does the number of plugins installed matter? and how many plugins installed is considered too much? I have 34 installed on my site

    Yes and No.
    You can have many small and efficient plugins and dont experience any impact,
    and you can have 1-2 plugins and heavy theme that will dramatically increase resource usage

    Related to error 500
    check out your server PHP error log, strings with “Fatal”, they will tell more about the cause of error 500.

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