Sudden peaks of server load insanely high

  • Hi. I’ve been a user of WP for +4 years now, but now I’m using it in my work as a news CMS with a serious problem: the server freezes too often.

    The highlights:

    – Our website have +/- 18.000 unique visitors and 45.000 pageviews per day.
    – We publish an average of 80 posts (news) per day. Now we have +6.800 entries.
    – Yes. We had a lot of plugins, but now we disabled all but 6 (Akismet, Audio Player, FeedBurner FeedSmith, User Locker, vSlider and WP Super Cache).
    – We use Comfy as theme.

    We have a modest server (Quad-Core with just enough RAM under a 10 Mbps line) that makes it suspicious. However, the odd thing is the server won’t fall on peak hours only, but suddenly at noon or midnight when everything seems fine.

    The load of the server goes from 2-4 to 10 and then to 50 at a jump, and the server hangs. We have changed it 3 times to discarg hardware issues.

    Now, I have read that the last version of WP (2.8.4) have CPU problems. You know if this is real? What can I do?

    You can see the website (if it’s running ??) on https://www.radiobiobio.cl

    Any orientation will be very much appreciated.
    Christian.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • pixelgeek

    (@pixelgeek)

    I have the same issue

    We’ve moved to a different server so it isn’t hardware related. My load goes to 200+ and kills the server.

    I’ve got the latest version of WP installed and Debian is updated regularly.

    I have been having this issue also. My server goes down about once a week and the datacenter said it is because of the load on the WordPress pages. I have installed a cache plug-in on every site on the server that runs wordpress and it is still crashing the server.

    A client on my server tried to update his WP site to 3.1 using autoupdate. It failed, but after the attempt it suddenly created a major server load and crashed the server. I took the site off line.

    In attempts to help the customer, I manually updated his site without any plugins. Just to be sure that was not the issue. Once I upgraded the db all heck broke loose and the server load shot up and nearly crashed the box again. I took it off line.

    There seems to be some kind of loop that is sending out requests in a loop. The bandwidth went nuts.

    This is a good friend of mine and I’ve let him place his site on one of our servers. I hate to boot him off, but unless someone can tell me what to do here.. I have to give him a choice to move him to another CMS or go to another host.

    I have a couplf of other customers that have Word Press sites and now I’m worried. I may have to have all WP sites removed from our servers as I can’t control this. We don’t over load our boxes and I only have a handful of sites hosted that I don’t manage. Those happen to be the small WP sites. They will be updating soon I’m sure.

    I have massive Joomla sites on one of my boxes, running tons of videos lots of traffic and there are never any of these issues. I can’t understand why a simple blog with modest traffic can kill an entire zeon server with 4 GB of Ram.

    Suggestions… please!

    Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    Are you getting lots of traffic to some particular URL? I’ve seen spam attacks bring down a server like this before.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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