High CPU Usage

As a follow-up: it appears that my hosting company has now completely disabled my site. Before going back to them, I’d like to have more information about this to discuss with them.

And again, I’m happy to upgrade to NextGEN Plus if it has features that improve CPU usage issues.

@icarusd – Thanks for all of those details but unfortunately there is not telltale item that indicates anything specifically there related to NextGEN Gallery.

Updating to NextGEN Plus will not likely make any significant differences as far as this particular issue you are describing goes.

The only thing I can suggest is test this at a baseline of using a default WordPress Twenty series theme and only have NextGEN Gallery active.

If you are looking at caching plugins, we generally find the default settings of W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache work well … beyond the defaults becomes much too site/server specific for us to recommend anything further.

– Cais.

Thank you so much for your response. I have new details that will hopefully help.

I managed to restore access to my site by disabling all of my plugins through the Control Panel. When I did that, my site was completely restored except for things dependent on plugins (the galleries weren’t working, and neither were the ads on my site that are served through the AdRotate plugin, for example).

Before I reverted to a Twenty series theme, I just wanted to see if the site would work with only the NextGEN Galleries working. It did … briefly. Clicking on posts and pages that did not have galleries was fine. If I clicked on a blog post with a gallery, it loaded, but as soon as I tried to paginate (for galleries with more than 20 images), or click on another post with a gallery, I received error messages replacing the text of the post. Here are two examples of the error message (the emphasis is in the original).

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 262144 bytes) in /home/cosmom2/public_html/sfgaylife/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/datamapper/package.module.datamapper.php on line 1303

and

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 262144 bytes) in/home/cosmom2/public_html/sfgaylife/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1931

I disabled the NextGEN plugin and everything started working fine again (except for galleries not displaying, of course). I clicked around extensively without any problems. But as soon as I re-enabled the NextGEN plugin, the same pattern occurred: the first time I clicked on a post with a gallery, it loaded fine, but I got either the error message above or a completely blank page the second time I clicked on a page with a gallery. I tried this several times, turning on and off NextGEN, always with the same effect.

I then tried running the site with only my AdRotate plugin working, but with NextGEN and every other plugin disabled. It worked fine and I was able to click throughout the site extensively without any errors.

I currently have the site running with every former plugin re-activated except NextGEN, and so far there haven’t been any errors.

By the way, my site was running for over a year using NextGEN Gallery and almost a year with my current theme without problem. This problem flared up last week. I did not install any new plugins before it happened. My hosting company had contacted me for three weeks leading up to this telling me that my CPU usage was too high, but other than that, the site was still functional.

The only thing I can think of is either having over 25,000 photos has overloaded it, or my hosting company has imposed some sort of memory constraints that this plugin is exceeding?

Do you really only have 40MB of memory allocated to your PHP process?

I didn’t actually set anything. I’m more of a content guy, with just enough technical skill to get myself into trouble. I think that my hosting company set that limit to throttle my CPU usage because I’m on a shared server and my CPU usage was too high.

Last night I Googled that error message, figured out what it was and how to increase my memory allocation, and gradually raised it until the NextGEN Galleries were working again without that error. (It’s now set to 128MB.)

Then I re-activated the NextGEN plugin but de-activated all of my other plugins.

I didn’t get a ton of traffic overnight, only 210 page views yesterday (I normally average around 1,500 page views a day). But my CPU usage skyrocketed to 12.74% (from around 1.66%). I’m pretty convinced that it’s the galleries that are hogging the CPU. My hosting company naturally can’t allow that in a shared environment, and as this is a hobby site that hasn’t ever generated any income (despite worthless affiliate ads), I can’t afford to upgrade to a dedicated server.

Is there anything I can do to optimize so that NextGEN works more efficiently? I’ve put in so much effort over the last year on the content side, and in increasing my traffic. I would hate to have to scrap NextGEN and migrate to some other gallery option, but I may be forced to.

Any suggestions?

@icarusd – I really cannot say off-hand what the issue is with CPU usage unless you are using a lot of “dynamic” displays throughout your site that are getting traffic spikes.

Perhaps a link to your site might help to identify some of these more intensive displays if that is the case.

– Cais.