Siteground CPU high usage

t turns out a Chinese IP logged in to my WP account and updated a high number of posts, causing the high CPU usage, without updating anything.

updated posts? That sure sounds like your site might be compromised (unless those are legit users).

I am hesitant to disable the WP-Cron or use the heartbeat plugin

agreed. Turning them off for diagnosis is OK, but they do useful things.

So, putting aside your rant (and geez, I’d love to rant about a host I wasted an hour on today), the issue seems to be to track down the high CPU usage.

Have you run the plugin profiler? https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/p3-profiler/ That might provide a clue. That looks primarily at load time but might give you some idea of “fat” plugins.

Also, using a cache combination like autoptimize and WP Super Cache can significantly reduce server load. As an alternative, put your site behind Cloudlfare’s CDN so very little of the read-only access ever hits siteground.

Thanks Steve. I have the CDN and Super Cache on too, in fact I have spent the last 3 months optimising and testing my site with some very good improvements.

I agree about the China thing, but Siteground are just insistent I reduce my CPU usage, when is just mental.

I have checked and scanned, from what I can see there is no compromise. Other than the support from Siteground, it’s my main concern, we’ll see what comes back from them.

Thanks for the clear info too, I suspected that WP-Cron etc was core to WP, I’m a bit fed up of switching WP code off because the hosts say its causing issues.

@mulberrycrush

No issues with using the Heartbeat Control plugin, if you just set it for

Control heartbeat locations: Allow only on post edit pages
Override heartbeat frequency: 60 seconds

Use it on every client site, it works very well.

Thanks Luke, that’s the settings I use

Also, don’t forget to check:

https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/websiteperformance/incorrect_scalability.htm

and

https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/websiteperformance/reduce-executions.htm

In case you haven’t already.

Hello @mulberrycrush

I’m Ivan, nice to meet you. I am part of the Senior technical support team at SiteGround.

I’d be happy to help you with the case and provide you some more detailed information about it.

Can you provide me with a ticket number you have in our system or your domain name so I can locate your account and investigate the issue further?

Looking forward to your reply.

Hi Ivan,

1898755

After about 15 hours Siteground have confirmed it’s WordPress’s fault and not the Siteground pricing set up.

I appreciate your contacting me on this, though I think it’s a little too far gone. I need to remove the WP Cron or my account will be suspended.

Regards

Thanks. I’d say that such issues could be caused by a lot of things, such as let’s say “incompatibility” between plugins/themes, increase of the traffic, bruteforce attempts, etc. There are a lot of factors that do not depend on us or the application. The important thing is to find the root cause of the problem and take the appropriate actions in order to prevent this from happening in the future.

Thus, I will check the case further and will update your ticket in our system with the things i’ve found shortly:)

So it turns out to be high bot traffic and what we should call “spam” traffic causing the high CPU usage. After two days of arguing I was forced to implement the WP-cron hack and the heartbeat mod, however this had no impact on the high CPU usage. As it turns out, there was another bot flood just after I implemented the fix which put the CPU usage through the roof again.

Net result is, all cache systems I can implement, CDN (inc system protection to check if the request is human), Super-Cacher, Dynamic Cache, Memcached, Autoptimize, .htaccess restrictions, lazy loading and expire timers and now with the WP Cron bypass and the heartbeat mod makes no difference.

That’s a lot just to get a CMS to run well and all on a host who is No.1 for WP, as they claim.

I appreciate attacks can take the best of sites down, but this wasn’t DDOS, this was high crawler activity etc. Now I have resource restrictions and alerts for CPU abuse advising I should upgrade hosting.

This isn’t WP, this is Siteground, we could have just blocked and restricted traffic instead of chopping away at WP. Instead the traffic was misidentified several times.. The support ticket is long but WP is redeemed, though 2 days of no progression on my companies site. The host seem to just let the traffic flood in and demand the end user takes action to optimize or pay up.

Any recommendations for a good WP host?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by mulberrycrush.

Hello @mulberrycrush. I updated your SiteGround ticket – please read it and let me know how to proceed.

On a side note I would like to say that I quickly checked your site and I found out that every time the home page is accessed several PHP executions are generated. Here are two of them that consume a lot of CPU time:

1. https://www.hardwareslave.com/wp-content/themes/hws1/inc/jackbox/php/graphics.php?jackbox_path=../img/graphics/

2. POST request (call_an_adblock_counter) towards https://www.hardwareslave.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Removing those or changing the settings of the theme and the adblock-notify-by-bweb plugin will address part of the CPU issue.

Hi Siteground, stop posting here, this is a host issue not a WP issue.
I will post the results on all the trustpilots etc, but this is a WP support site and there ain’t nothing wrong with WordPress.

Hi @mulberrycrush. Thanks for the update. As per your request your SiteGround support ticket has been updated with more information about the case. Let’s continue the communication via our ticketing system.

@sterndata

Have you run the plugin profiler? https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/p3-profiler/

is quite outdated (2 years) is it still useful?

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Alain Aubry.

Hello guys,

I’m experiencing the same identical issues of @mulberrycrush and i can confirm
that the behavior of Siteground is very disappointing and is make me think that is marketing strategy.

We followed all siteground instructions and also if we made a lot of optimizations:

– Reducing and optimizing the database from 150mb to 50mb
– Disable wp-config
– 60 seconds heartbeat
– Optimize the database tables
– Optimize image sizes (100/100)
– Activated Cache and memcache
– Activated Cloudflare
– Protection from DDOS with Wordfence
– Only 5 occasionally slow queries

They continue to say that the problem is our website.
I’m telling this situation in a lot of forum and facebook page and a lot of people is telling me to leave SG as fast as i can and go on other hosting.

I’m seriously valuating some alternatives and reading other reviews about Siteground i’m discovering a lot of experiences like that!

It is very disappointing also because i taken more than 20 website on SG with a web agency wich i work with. Now i think that things will change….

Hello @astronomitaly

Can you please let me know what is ID of the ticket you have opened, so we can investigate the issue further?