503 WordPress Error Ajax

  • Hi,

    I’d be really really grateful for any help you can give me with a recurring problem with my wordpress site, https://www.morapandorablog.com. I don’t have much technical knowledge and am finding this very hard to diagnose & resolve.

    Ever since the new year, when I’ve posted a new article and shared it to Facebook via either Jetpack Publicize or the Jetpack sharing buttons, it has almost instantly crashed my website with a 503 error. The website on all three occasions seems to have started behaving again when I deleted the link to it on Facebook. I don’t know whether this is due to an error with the link to Facebook or whether it’s because fewer people are clicking the site and putting stress on it as the link has been removed.

    I have cloud hosting and plenty of resources allocated to the website, and have never had problems like this before, even with far higher loads of traffic, so I’m thinking that there is actually something wrong with the website rather than there just being issues with the number of people visiting the website. It has also started rather abruptly, and I am not aware of having changed anything. I have since made sure all my plug ins were up to date, and have run WP Optimize on my database as well.

    I contacted my host and asked them if they could see any problem on their end. They have said that the process that is responsible for the high CPU loads is admin-ajax.php. They suggested disabling WordPress Heartbeat. I have not done this yet, because I am wondering whether this is treating the symptoms rather than diagnosing the cause. What would suddenly cause that ajax process to be running so much and causing server crashes? Could it be malicious? Or a malfunctioning plug in?

    Sorry for the length of this; I’d be very grateful for any advice you might have!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Review this: https://www.checkupdown.com/status/E503.html
    – contact your webhost.
    – check your .htaccess file
    – check IP restrictions.
    – check DNS/name servers
    – If the issue persists, it is likely a server issue despite what your host says.

    Thread Starter elz91

    (@elz91)

    Thank you very much for your response. My hosts are insistent that there is a problem with WordPress Heartbeat and the ajax process – when you say it is likely a server issue, do you mean some kind of misconfiguration on their end? It has only started since the new year, and I changed nothing before it happened – the amount of traffic I’m getting is not unusual for my website, either!

    Hi,

    I just had the same issue this week, my quick fix was to update php from 5.6 to 7.

    Hope this help!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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