Too many admin-ajax.php POST requests causing problems on Siteground

  • Resolved smc2935

    (@smc2935)


    4 years, 2 months ago

    Hi,

    I just switched two sites to Siteground and immediately started having trouble with our email accounts. When trying to send I frequently get an error that says “Too much load, try again later.” Siteground support told me the server is experiencing a high load because wp-admin/admin-ajax.php is being executed aggressively. It turns out a significant amount of traffic is POST requests to /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

    I disabled the WP Heartbeat on both sites, use SG Optimizer for caching, image optimization, HTML, CSS, JS minification and Cloudflare on both sites.

    Based on some Googling, the problem could be bot traffic. So I carried over all the blocked IP addresses from my previous host to Siteground…no change.

    The plan is a $90/month cloud hosting. So it’s not like some cheap shared hosting. I was assured by their tech support the plan I chose was adequate for the amount of traffic I get.

    This was not a problem with my previous host. I have the same plugins and theme on both sites as I did with the old host. Several people here report a similar problem with Siteground.

    Any advice what to check next or how to determine if one of my plugins/theme is causing the problem?

    Thanks!

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

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Tyler

    (@tylerthedude)

    Hi there,

    A lot of plugins that send asynchronous requests use the WordPress Ajax API, so it’s not uncommon to see a high amount of POST requests to this endpoint. However, it’s very possible that there’s a plugin activated on your site which is sending an abnormal amount of requests thus causing the high server usage.

    I’d recommend checking out this article from WP Rocket – https://docs.wp-rocket.me/article/985-how-to-find-which-plugin-calls-admin-ajax-php

    It will tell you how to find which plugins are utilizing the API, once you find these plugins I’d recommend temporarily deactivating each one and try sending an email after each deactivation. Once you find the culprit, you could keep it deactivated or if you use the plugin frequently then I’d recommend reaching out to the developers to see why there’s so many requests being send to the Ajax endpoint.

    Best regards,
    Tyler

    Thread Starter smc2935

    (@smc2935)

    @tylerthedude Thank you for the info. Using the Chrome dev tools as mentioned in that article I was able to find out which plugin was causing the problem.

    I use Advanced Ads and the tracking feature was generating about 50 ajax requests. I’m not sure if that’s a lot but considering my other site was probably generating about the same, multiplied by however many page views I’ve had lately. It makes sense that it was stressing the server.

    Now to see if the email problem is fixed.

    Hi @smc2935,

    Thomas here, the developer of Advanced Ads Tracking.

    I wanted to make sure there is no undiscovered issue on our end since it read as if you had 50 individual AJAX requests per page impression due to Advanced Ads. This should not happen. We bundle all impressions in a single call.

    I see that you already switched to our Google Analytics tracking, which does not need such AJAX call. That is the best solution! Still, could I ask you to let us know in customer support if I understood correctly about the amount of AJAX calls with the other tracking method?

    Thanks,
    Thomas

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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