Huge CPU load

  • The network in question has just been moved to a WHM/Cpanel VPS with 512mb of ram and gets about 5K visits a day.

    Shortly after the move I noticed enormous load averages (up to 30). I’ve tried recompiling, reconfiguring, updating everything, caching, searching forums, default theme….seemingly everything.

    I mirrored the busiest site on the network (as a single WP install, not multisite) on another VPS (same host) and the load was fine (0.02).

    A lot of caching and performance tuning has gotten the load averages down to about 1-2 – which is still too high, but at least the sites stay online.

    Looking at the php error log I see a lot of “WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax;” and out of memory errors.

    Anyone have any idea what could be the cause?

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  • Looking at the php error log I see a lot of “WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax;” and out of memory errors.

    Anyone have any idea what could be the cause?

    You left off the bit from that error message that gives a clue where to look.

    My guess is a rampant plugin, or someone’s got an rss feed pulling back & forth within the network.

    (OP here – My account seems to have stopped working so I made another.)

    Thanks for your reply Andrea!

    I deactivated/updated all of the plugins and the load problem remains (well got much worse without caching)

    The full mysql error is: 

    [09-May-2011 03:07:56] WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1 for query SELECT * FROM wp_4_posts WHERE id =  made by wp_xmlrpc_server->serve_request, IXR_Server->IXR_Server, IXR_Server->serve, IXR_Server->call, wp_xmlrpc_server->mw_editPost, wp_update_post, wp_insert_post, wp_transition_post_status, do_action, call_user_func_array, apt_check_required_transition, apt_publish_post

    …and happens about three times a day, but the high load is constant.

    someone’s got an rss feed pulling back & forth within the network.

    Sounds promising. Can you elaborate on this?

    Any other ideas what could be wrong?

    re: the rss widget – go look and see if anyone is using the built in RSS widget. then, if so, look and see what feed address they put in there. Some users have no idea what it’s for (external feeds) and have been known to put in their own feed address, causing a loop.

    FROM wp_4_posts WHERE id = made by wp_xmlrpc_server->

    So… did you enable remote publishing? (xmlrpc)

    No sites are using the RSS widget.

    Remote publishing is enabled and is done via windows live writer.

    I didn’t set the sites up and they have just moved to a new hosting environment…

    Any more ideas?

    Thanks for your help!

    The error you reported above is directly related to the remote publishing being enabled. Disable it. Does the issue go away?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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