Server Crashes on Media Upload

  • CmdrKeene

    (@shawnkeenegmailcom)


    1 year, 6 months ago

    I don’t know what is so wrong with this website. Bluehost moved me to a VPS and said it’d perform better but it still has so many troubles that I’ve never had on any other WP install.

    If I upload a picture to the media page, the entire server crashes and I have to wait about 5 full minutes before I can even use wp-admin again.

    Since I have WHM access (but have no clue how to actually administer it), I have been able to determine through error notification emails and basic process monitoring, that SQL is crashing. I see what appears to be indications that the system goes under extremely high CPU load when I import media. To be clear, I’m adding 1 single small jpg or png file and this reproduces every time.

    Then

    I am able to generally perform most other actions on the site. I can create and edit pages, customer orders both manual and recurring subscription orders in our Woo shop are continuing to function (critical as this is responsible for a few thousand dollars in sales a month).

    I’m so tired of this site being in a constant precarious state. I have been tempted to “restore” my jetpack vault press to another host and see if it handles this any better. It’s not a high-traffic site by any stretch.

    If anyone has any ideas about how to trace why adding a media file causes a total site crash, please reach out. If you know a consultant we should hire to sort it out, please recommend. If you need any details about how this server is configured please let me know. I’m at my wits end.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter CmdrKeene

    (@shawnkeenegmailcom)

    You can probably guess that bluehost has been of absolutely zero help whatsoever.

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    The issue is the mysql server. A couple of possibilities:

    1. your server has limited memory and the OOM process is shutting down mysql to keep the server from crashing
    2. your database may be corrupt, and crashing the server. Via PHPMYADMIN from your hosting control panel, check and repair (if necessary) your database tables.
    Thread Starter CmdrKeene

    (@shawnkeenegmailcom)

    I’m sort of inclined to think it’s the later case at the moment. I connected by SSH and from the top command and although 2GB seems low to me, the utilization is so low I assume this must be normal.

    I want to try uploading media now and watch this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a memory usage peak here but I have seen CPU usage climb high, especially (perhaps only) when trying to import media. Most public facing pages are heavily cached and don’t touch the server and traffic is really low anyway. Admin pages aren’t cached though and I see CPU load average climb over 1.00 if I’m in admin changing products or things.

    I have users on the site right now and I’d rather avoid taking the site offline for 5-10 minutes at a time at the moment. I will explore late tonight around midnight (about 12 hours from now) and see what I can learn or if repairing tables in phpmyadmin helps.

    All my other wordpress sites have always been on really basic shared hosting, this is the only one I’ve ever had such real direct server access to beyond the bare basic cPanel things. And I realize that’s way out of scope of “WordPress” but I do worry this thing isn’t configured right or something. Although this site was just as buggy before Bluehost migrated us to VPS (which for all I know, the “migration” was just granting us this WHM access and didn’t involve moving the site at all, it’s been a black box to me).

    Thread Starter CmdrKeene

    (@shawnkeenegmailcom)

    I don’t know why but if I upload media from wordpress.com and let it synchronize to the site (jetpack rpc I guess), it doesn’t crash the server although it takes like 3 full minutes for a 1mb png picture. Looking on my server’s actual FTP in the uploads directory I see the file pop in in about 12 different sizes. I wonder if that work is what’s causing the issue.

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