manuel38

D’oh I meant 4.x.x

Shame… seems like it would be very useful!

Interface worked for me in 4.4.1 but I got an error about “no visits recorded”

OK and now here are all things I’ve done so far to troubleshoot.

1) Cloned my server to rule out a hardware problem. No improvement.

2) Took an image of another server running a WordPress site with most of the same plugins and just a different theme and installed this problem site on it. No improvement. Among other things the purpose here was to rule out that I didn’t screw something up fiddling around with Apache and MySQL tuning trying to fix the problem.

3) Tried managed WordPress hosting at Flywheel. They are working on it. They made the following suggestions which did not help at all.

A) Install “Delete Expired Transients” plugin and delete expired transients. (Note I did not do “all transients — use with caution! because I don’t really understand what this does)

B) Created an index over that table [wp_options I think] for the “autoload” data which will help speed up that query but doesn’t fully solve the issue if transients aren’t being removed properly.

C) Behind the scenes things that are totally opaque to me but they mentioned “bumping performance settings” and “tuning things”.

The only difference with Flywheel is that the site seems to perform acceptably with CloudFlare enabled whereas CloudFlare could not save my server but I am not sure that would hold with a traffic spike. Without CloudFlare the Flywheel installation is terrible too. I get page load times as long as 8 or 9 seconds. The admin panel is almost unsuable. Today I have not been able to connect Jetpack to WordPress.com due to a 15,000 milisecond time out limitation by Flywheel.

4) I installed a query monitor and while the MySQL performance certainly could be better it does not appear to be the main bottleneck right now.

As I continue to test and tune on my own server configuration I get results like this in the admin panel:

Page generation time: 3.6608 12.2% of 30s limit

Peak memory usage: 104,416 kB 39.8% of 262,144 kB limit

Database Query time: 0.0179

Database Queries: SELECT: 23 SHOW: 1 DELETE: 2

And I see things like this on the front page:

Page generation time: 3.4225 11.4% of 30s

Memory usage 102,837 kB 19.6% of 524,288 kB limit

Query time: 0.1003

Database Query Time: SELECT: 55 SHOW: 1 UPDATE: 1

On the front end I see the page generation time going through the roof sometimes though. It ranges from 3-12 seconds. The rest of the stuff is relatively consistent whether I’m looking at the front end or the admin panel. And this is just me as a single client browsing on my test server – the live site is running off Flywheel now. Sometimes just reloading the home page once pushes the load up over 1! I’ll see 3-4 apache processes popup taking a combined 90-100% of the CPU and they remain for a second or a two and then disappear. Of course with just a couple more clients this would bog down completely very fast.

The memory usage seems fine (although again this is with only one client testing) but the CPU is through the roof.

Do you have any other ideas for me? I would really like to solve this.

Thanks.

So some more details…

As mentioned disabling Jetpack seems to make the problem less severe (it’s the only plugin that has a marked effect on performance) but it certainly doesn’t fix it.

I’ve tried absolutely everything I can think of and not only that but every piece of advice I could get from hosting providers, friends, forums, etc. No dice. I have tried the site now on four different servers so I think it is something in the WordPress code but this seems ridiculous because the only changes I’ve made are: 1) Add articles, 2) Plugin updates as they become available, 3) WordPress core updates as they become available. The problems appeared on or about Dec 20.

More details to come.

Oh no… I just typed out a huge reply to this and lost it.

1. OK installed that, thanks.

2. Very familiar with CloudFlare and have it properly configured.

3. Didn’t nkow that, thanks, will do.

4. Deactivating Jetpack and the white screen of death: There is nothing in my php error log, also not in MySQL or Apache.

5. 520 errors were through CloudFlare. If I can create them again and see them without CloudFlare I’ll report back.

6. The memory limit is not defined in wp-config.php or wp-settings.php – should I add it or does it default to 40M anyway?

I will add some more in a bit.

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks. Great info here. Let me go through all of this and gather the data and get back to you.

Thanks!

There is some more info in this thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/server-keeps-crashing-cannot-determine-the-cause

Didn’t find anything useful in the logs. I can post them if it’s helpful for anyone but I just don’t see anything there besides the xmlrpc.php attacks which haven’t been happening since mid Dec and I blocked the related IPs already.

It seems like Jetpack is either some or perhaps all of the problem, see this thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/cannot-deactivate-jetpack?replies=1#post-7856408

Not sure what to do now.

I can do all this and I will but I can give you some quick answers to some of these questions right now.

The site gets about 3,000-5,000 hits per day and about 115,000-135,000 hits per month. The traffic pattern obviously isn’t 100% smoothly spread out but it isn’t something like a sports news site where it gets hammered during a game and then is idle most of the rest of the time. Concurrent visitors usually range from let’s say around 5 to 30… nothing that big.

I’ll grab all this data and post it in a bit but the weird thing is nothing has changed with the configuration (well other than what I’ve been trying to fool around with to fix these new problems that appeared recently) – it ran fine for 8-9 months without being touched at all.

Had some issues with DDOS/brute force attacks against xmlrpc.php about 6-8 weeks ago but blocking that cleared it up instantly. Now the problems looks the same but I can’t find any explanation.

I’m really left clueless here.

Thanks again for your help

I installed Sea Lion. Shortly after the server completely blew up again and I had to restart it. It looks like it was running very poorly 8-10 hours ago but then it recovered. It seems like although there is clearly something wrong with the server there is some external catalyst that causes this because of the randomness of the time frames between when reboots are required.

I can’t correlate this with any particularly time of day. It seems random. Sometimes it will run for 10 minutes and sometimes a few hours but very rarely more than a day.

The top 10 CPU is always filled with Apache. The top 10 memory is almost always filled with Apache occasionally with a single MySQL process in the bottom 5. The top single instance of Apache is frequently taking 10-20% of memory all by itself.

https://s21.postimg.org/evojun2zr/image.png
https://s27.postimg.org/nwoy0qecz/image.png
https://s30.postimg.org/maneh91ch/image.png
https://s13.postimg.org/8q9zf5mlj/image.png

My MySQL version is 5.5.41 and PHP is 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.7

Do you have any suggestions as to what I can do next?

Hi Joe,

Maybe saying crash is misleading and the wrong thing to say on my part. I can still SSH in but the load in top is over 20, 520 errors are the norm to anyone visiting the site, basically it’s non-fucntional although not fully crashed to the point a power cycle is needed.

I am pretty certain it’s Apache that is eating up all the memory. I will try to install Sea Lion.

I understood that you can’t just disable xml-rpc because Jetpack depends on it (and I depend on some of the jetpack features) – am I wrong? If you want to just disable it I think you can do that with wp-config.php without even using a plugin can’t you?

Thanks for your help.

Thank you for the info.

I have contacted support as requested.

Local blacklist would be nice.