Photon “generating massive amounts of requests”

Hi

Hope one of you good people here will help me with this, I’ve searched existing threads with no success.

In trying to ascertain why my site was spiking out on resources, causing 503s, the host (Siteground) are pointing towards what they term “In all of the cases the Jetpack’s Photon generated massive amounts of requests towards theibizan.com which caused the load spikes. “.

To give some context this is a not too shabby cloud vps, and when the problem started i immediately added more ram and cpu as a quick fix, but the spikes went through that also.

For what it is worth I have copied a few rows of the logs below – there seems no rhyme or reason as to the images it is processing on our site, they appear totally random from recent and far distant uploads.

using latest wp, php 7.1, recent switch from http to https.

i have temporarily disabled photon as it is taking the site down with 503s every hour for 20 seconds or so.

any ideas why this surge is occurring? why it has suddenly started after so long using photon without problems? or even what it is actually doing? or any way of throttling whatever it is doing to a reasonable load rate? any help gratefully received.

there are literally thousands of images in the log, and the routine seems to be running every hour. – here are a few lines

192.0.99.203 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:00 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fotosredactores20170520212509-30_g.jpg HTTP/1.1” 200 63315 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.114.113 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/01/28592296.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 50816 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.112.147 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ibiza-2005-2.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 55424 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.113.241 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Poster-Bradley-BLUNDELL-Spain-1.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 140278 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.113.177 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/01/piscina_IMG_1368.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 81482 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.117.242 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/01/28071523.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 32331 “-” “Photon/1.0”
192.0.116.50 – – [14/Mar/2018:07:59:01 -0500] “GET /wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ibiza-crowded.jpg HTTP/1.0” 200 73083 “-” “Photon/1.0”

The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]