memory max causes VPS to lock up

You’re not going to like my answer. ??

Basically, it could be anything, and where I’m going to tell you to look is educated guessing for the purposes of elimination. (having had to do the same pretty much on any host we’re ever been on except dedicated).

Start combing your access logs. See if your host will help look for spammers hitting the box. Sometimes they won’t. Start blocking IP addresses, see if it stops spiking.

Look at error logs, fix as many as possible.

Clean up plugins – make things as efficient as possible. See if you can detect any patterns to when things go down, and disable plugins to see if that stops it.

So basically you have to sit on top of the box and watch traffic, see if you can narrow down what’s going on. Yes, it will be an eye-bleeding pain in the rear.

If you’re using WP Super Cache, try also adding in a Minification plugin. But … as Andrea said, it’s a suck trace job.

I would also consider amping up the server Firewall

thank you thank you. site5 said upgrading to 2 gb memory would help but the cost is prohibitive for my little business!

Are you on 1gig now? Is that total or how uh they’ll let you spike to?

756mb is “total memory available on the VPS” per site5.

I think I may have figured it out. My main theme used on 80% of my sites was using mySQL RAND to show 5 posts on index.php. Got rid of orderby RAND and seems better.

Thanks for responses.

Yeah something like that’ll do it.

cleaned that one query up and then had another failure last night but can’t figure out where it is. Here are some queries from log but don’t know what part of site is using them.

1) SELECT wp_1_posts.* FROM wp_1_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_1_posts.post_parent = 14259 AND (post_mime_type LIKE ‘image/%’) AND wp_1_posts.post_type = ‘attachment’ AND (wp_1_posts.post_status = ‘inherit’) ORDER BY menu_order,wp_1_posts.ID ASC;

2)SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_1_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (2806,1519,2568,1874,600);

3) SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_42_options WHERE autoload = ‘yes’;

I think I may have figured it out. My main theme used on 80% of my sites was using mySQL RAND to show 5 posts on index.php. Got rid of orderby RAND and seems better.

What theme is this? It’s really possibly that a poorly written theme can over-query everything :/ You may need to dump it.

but don’t know what part of site is using them.

most of the queries are looking at the first site. if it’s an upgraded mu install, it will find the wp_1_tables. if it’s a WP install with multisite enabled, it won’t. and thus cause a multitude of error.

what theme is running on the main site? the first two queries look like it’s grabbing specific posts.

This is the main install which was mu originally and upgraded as per normal versioning: https://tmoindustries.com/

Here are my two busiest sites using same theme:

https://groovyvegetarian.com/

https://apartmentbuildingforsale.net/

Theme was originally called “bluesome” and I edited (i am not a coder so I could have messed it up) or the issues are inherent in theme. The theme is not supported and I dont think it is even around for download anymore…