Performance Issues Caused By admin-ajax.php

  • Resolved brad_merrill

    (@brad_merrill)


    9 years, 10 months ago

    Hello,

    Our site has been experiencing some serious performance issues and downtime over the last week, which a sysadmin at our host narrowed down to repeated calls to admin-ajax.php. We get a decent amount of traffic – between 20k and 50k PVs a day – and it seems admin-ajax.php is being called with every page load. Our server (VPS) is powerful enough to handle our traffic without the calls to admin-ajax.php, but that’s killing it.

    I’ve tried disabling all plugins and changing themes, neither of which solved the problem. I’m also using the Heartbeat Control plugin, which doesn’t seem to be helping either.

    We have exhausted every possible solution we can think of, so I’m hoping someone here will have some better insight.

    Thanks so much in advance!

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Do you have a link to the site? Also there must be more information about the admin-ajax calls, are they POST or GET requests? Do they have any header information or field information?

    Thread Starter brad_merrill

    (@brad_merrill)

    They are POST requests:

    78.73.210.103 - - [25/Jan/2015:02:09:56 -0600] "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1" 200 17 "https://venturebreak.com/2014/11/15/install-movie-box-ios-8-1-without-jailbreak/" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 8_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B440 Safari/600.1.4"

    We’re getting these every couple of seconds.

    The URL is https://venturebreak.com, though you’re more likely to get a 503 than access the site at the moment.

    If you have access to your codebase, can you do a search for “itajax-” and see what file is handling these requests? I think that might point you to the source of the problem. I’m not sure what all these requests are for but I am seeing multiple POST requests being sent when I hit a page. My hunch is that it is some sort of tracking/analytics.

    After further inspection it looks like the source of the ajax calls is the theme itself the prefix “it” being industrial themes. Since this is a commercial theme, I recommend contacting them for support about the issue.

    Thread Starter brad_merrill

    (@brad_merrill)

    Yep – it was the Engine theme by Industrial Themes. Wow, what an oversight. Thanks so much for your help!

    I’ll get in touch with the developer.

    Thanks again – have a good one!

    I am dealing with the same issues around calls to admin-ajax.php. Our website inewsguyana.com was working fine without incidents for over 8 months. A few days ago the dedicated server crippled from overwhelming process request to admin-ajax.php. The following are actions we took:

    – We diactivated the HeartBeat API site wide but that did not solve the problem.

    – We disabled all the plugins and switch the theme to the default twentyfifteen theme and the problem still presented itself.

    – We inserted rules only to alloy our single IP to access the website and the server load returned to normal. (but now the site is not accessible to the world – so this of course was not a solution but just a test).

    – We restored our plugins, updated our main theme files (Effective News) and inserted the following to prevent floods from calls to admin-ajax.php: here are the .htaccess rules:

    ErrorDocument 416 “Requested Range Not Satisfiable”
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} “/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php”
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [R=416,L]

    At the moment the server load is normal – under 1 but functions that depend on admin-ajax.php is now crippled.

    Still hunting for a solution. Any help, suggestion will be appreciated.

    Clearly something is going terribly wrong with this file.

    Fix it WordPress, if all wordpress sites have this you are hammering the servers of hosters worldwide and it will be a mater of time before WordPress is banned from dedicated servers.

    craig

    (@craigheyworth)

    dito

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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