Resources maxed out

  • Hi there last week my site was reporting being down on and off for almost 24 hours due to excessive resource usage (max 512 memory, 1024 I/O). I was concerned because I believe the site gets minimal hits – it’s a village website. There were also 12 or 13 php processes constantly running.
    I stayed up until 2am one night to try and find out what was going on, and spent a considerable amount of time on the phone to GoDaddy too. I ended up disabling all plugins and killing all processes. The processes started up again and it was soon back up to maximum memory. I re-activated all the plugins and went to bed completely baffled. The next day it seemed to be back down to normal usage, minimal php processes and although the memory spikes occasionally it seems a lot better.
    The question I have is –
    What generates a new php process, is this someone on the site, a plugin running, both?

    A couple of months ago the site was very quick and it almost ground to a halt last week with no changes made. Very odd. The theme is fine as I use it elsewhere. The site is https://www.radleyvillage.org.uk.
    Thanks for any advice on this.

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  • Take a look at your server log files. When I get problems like this I sort the log file by IP address, and then look for large blocks where the IP address stays the same.

    Then I look at what those hits are actually doing. It could be a bad bod scraping the site, a good bot that’s just written poorly (Bingbot has brought down my sites before), or it could be a DOS attack.

    Also check the log files for the string “xmlrpc.php”. That is a file that is often attacked.

    Do you have any security plugins installed that protect your site from hackers?

    Thread Starter tonysab

    (@tonysab)

    Some excellent advice Matt – many thanks. I have done what you said and found that for Feb – the past 3 days – out of 25,000 log file entries, just under 6,000 were attributable to https://www.majestic12.co.uk, a further 7700 to bingbot plus about 2.5K to https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot.

    I shall look into some robots file entries I think to prevent these as they do seem to be killing the site.

    I also had 51 entries for xmlrpc.php – which on the face of it doesn’t seem too many. I have read that blocking this can also speed things up. I think I’ll hold off doing that for now but certainly keep an eye on it.

    I’ll make the robots entries and see how that goes. Thanks again for your help and advice.

    Thread Starter tonysab

    (@tonysab)

    After doing all this the site was fine. Now in the last 2-3 days it has re-occurred and I’m at a loss to explain why. Memory going through the roof, IO too. And yet nothing has changed on the site.
    Log files showed some new crawlers – yandex. In desperation I have set my robots.txt to disallow all bots except google. Last night I disabled all plugins on the site, but resources were still hitting max. Raw log files now show virtually no traffic, and yet the site is constantly timing out/ error 500.
    Godaddy have just advised it must be wp since https://www.radleyvillage.org.uk/home.html is fine.
    But I don’t know what else to do, it’s absolutely ridiculous as the amount of traffic is so low and yet something is eating all the resources!
    Any further advice gratefully received, thanks.

    Im having a similar problem with WP admin maxing aq out my I/O on my Godaddy WP website for unknown reason. Site is up and very small. https://www.johnrichards.us. Any clues as to why this would this is going on?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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