Help! WordPress Killing the CPU

  • Help! I’m desperate.

    Last week my WordPress site was shut down by my hosting provider for overwhelming the CPU. They’ve reactivated the site, but given me only a few days to find and resolve the problem. They keep pointing to WordPress, and my own troubleshooting reveals that it can only be WordPress.

    The site is https://quarkvsindesign.com. As of the 17th, it has been hitting 99% CPU usage on all four processor chips on the server. I don’t have the history prior to that, but I’m told it was hitting high points below 10%. The host’s server logs say the CPU usage is due to /usr/bin/php, but they can’t be any more specific than that.

    In troubleshooting, I’ve disabled everything PHP except WordPress Strayhorn 1.5.2.

    It’s not a hacked install, and I took the templates down to absolutely barebones in the course of troubleshooting–a solitary index.php and a single.php, no header.php or footer.php even. Traffic didn’t spike on the 17th, and the site’s overall traffic is only about 13% more than the previous month–it’s not enough to cause the CPU time to increase tenfold.

    I’m a level-headed and experienced technical troubleshooter (not a programming or network pro, however), but I’m completely lost here. I’ve tried disabling plugins (nothing atypical there anyway), with abosolutely no change. I even rolled the posts published since then back to draft status with no change in CPU usage. Everything but WordPress has been disabled, and the CPU usage is still astronomical.

    I would appreciate ANY help on this. Thank you.

Viewing 9 replies - 16 through 24 (of 24 total)
  • Thread Starter iamPariah

    (@iampariah)

    You know, that’s pretty interesting that there are so far three of us with the exact same problem, beginning at about the same time, united only by a WordPress installation that apparently ran for months with exactly the same configuration. It’s also interesting that the timing of this is pretty close to the splog (spam blog) explosion.

    Buxx and Richard, do your sites have high search engine rankings? My site is a very high traffic, high-ranking site in its industry. It could be we were all targeted–manually or by a spam bot–and that’s at the heart of our issues.

    I wonder if they found a new WP exploit, and we’re patient 0.

    richards1052

    (@richards1052)

    Just an fyi…WP-Cache does NOT resolve my CPU quota errors.

    My Google Page Rank is 6. I have a relatively low traffic site.

    richards1052

    (@richards1052)

    I have also deactivated all plugins & the problem remains.

    richards1052

    (@richards1052)

    Does anyone think a new WP installation might help?

    stukdog

    (@stukdog)

    We started having the same problem on the 25th. We have a fairly high traffic site, but on the 25th the CPU has grown higher and higher until it was 99% everyday.

    We use the Rin theme on our site.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Try WP-Cache:

    https://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

    Thread Starter iamPariah

    (@iampariah)

    WP-Cache helps a LITTLE, but it’s not the solution.

    In the end, I had to upgrade my hosting to a new dedicated server (with my own CPUs that WP could max without harming any other sites) at a cost of over 500% of the virtual server I had been using.

    This is not a problem caused by the various bloggers/webmasters. It’s either some new form of spam attack, poorly coded search engine spider upgrades, or a newly found exploit in WP.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Or a bad hosting provider that just need a new dedicated server customer to keep them afloat. Forcing a blog to move to a dedicated server is about the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard. Have you considered switching to another hosting provider?

    Thread Starter iamPariah

    (@iampariah)

    I don’t think that’s it. I ran down the domains of the others above who are having the same problems, and we’re all using different hosting companies.

    My hosting provider is a good one (in my experience), and I’ve got all the features I need for this server.

    That said, I had entertained the idea of switching providers, but if the host is not the problem, I’ll be setting myself up for the same result with someone else. In fact, it could be worse; the current provider put my site on a “holding” server–it was still available to visitors while the provider’s network admins and I troubleshot. With another provider, my site might be shut down outright without warning.

Viewing 9 replies - 16 through 24 (of 24 total)
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