WordPress is using over 700MB of memory!

I’ve also made sure to clear all table overhead.

So, overnight, I removed the W3 total cache plugin and this helped on average. I still have spikes up to about 500MB but the rest of it is fairly reasonable. The spikes are very frequent though. Before, it was a constant graph of 600-720MB, now it’s all over the map. But at least it drops down well below 100 at some times.

What memory usage do you get on a clean install of WordPress, using the Twenty Eleven Theme, and no Plugins active?

I can’t test that because I’ve got 5 or 6 sites on the VPS. What I can tell you, however, is the history from day to day.

Looking over the last 30 days, my VPS usage was usually right at 200. Some days it averaged 98, sometimes 210. But I’d say a solid average right at 200. The day I added this site, it averaged 488, the next 566, the next 628, the next 675, then I dropped it overnight and the average is down to 393.

So this one site, with no caching is now using about twice the resources of the rest combined WITH caching. Still seems odd.

I can’t uninstall all of the plugins or theme because it’s a live site.

Looking over the last 24 hours though, the average seems to be closer to maybe 475. The day isn’t over yet, that’s probably where the 393 comes in. But there are spikes, where as before it was a solid 600-700.

Truly, there is something wrong if your memory usage is 700MB. After 5 minutes of waiting and I could not view your site. Do you have a few hundred thousand visitors to your site?

I have never had this problem before, just try to see if I can help you. Looks like there is nothing wrong with your server – its in good condition. I did a pingdom.com test at https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ all if not most of your problems seem to be related to the picture loading. There is a lot of delays here.

According to pingdom your page size is about 500kB. That is not very large.

Other issues to consider:-

1. WP-e-commerce is not compatible with some themes. You may want to check if it is compatible with your theme. I think their site says after version 3.75 (or 3.7.5 I forget) may have compatibility issues with older themes. They are now on version 3.8.8.1 (I think) and I’m not sure if this is of help to you.

2. You database may be fragmented or ‘not optimised’ or even corrupted, you may want to optimise your database and see if that helps. Please do backup your database somewhere else before you do optimisation. I do not know which plugin is a good optimiser. You can copy your entire site to a temporary URL (ask your host tech support for one) copy the database to this temp URL and do the checking and testing on this non-live version to trace the problem. That is you are testing and debugging a dummy site. You could just export (use phpmyadmin) the database in the dummy site and import it back to see if there is a performance difference or if you have lost anything in the dummy site. Lost info could be due to database corruption.

3. From the dummy site you can change the theme to confirm if the issue is theme related.

4. W3 Total Cache is a pretty good cache. I am using PHP Image Cache, W3 Total Cache and Widget Cache – all 3 together. There is a particular way to install W3 Total Cache to get it to work very well. Please see my article on speeding up WordPress which will definitely help you once you sort this problem out, at https://bachutha.com/how-to-speed-up-wordpress-my-experience-with-slow-wordpress/

5. This may not be the cause but do check the PHP version and mysql version on your server is compatible with your version of WP and WP-e-commerce.

6. Was your site hacked before? Hackers could have installed some files that use up all the memory and slow your WP down to a crawl. Ask you tech host support if excess temporary files are being opened and if they can trace which program is doing it. If so delete those programs, you will need to know where they are being called from too.

I do hope this does help you.

I must add that certain .htaccess lines of code can cause problems if you are using a cache. I had mentioned that in my article.

Nope, not in the hundreds of thousands. I was thinking the theme was probably the issue. I’m going to try and duplicate this site on two test servers and do some split testing with the standard 2010 theme vs the installed one. Thanks very much for the rest of the pointers. I’m going to go through the list one at a time, and the link is a great resource as well!