WordPress & cpu overload; I'm flummoxed

[rosinalippi]

I'll try to be brief and clear.

I'm running WordPress 2.3 and have done so without any problems since the upgrade from 2.2.

About four days ago I started getting CPU overload messages and service interruptions. These are the things I've done to try to correct the problem:

1. I got in touch with the support people, who suggested that the problem was probably a lot of bots crawling at once.

2. I went through the WordPress help forums and got all the suggestions I could find there; googled wordpress cpu spike and got that information as well.

3. Took the following actions on the weblog:
-set up supercache and made sure it was working
-went to a simpler theme
-disabled every plugin I could possible disable (no more ajax, or anything else that takes up a lot of processing power)
-set the number of posts on the front page to 2.

4. Through all this I repeatedly checked the cpulogs, and the spikes are not getting any better. In fact, I think they're getting worse. It does seem to be index.php causing the problem, but I can't think why the index page (especially as it exists now) would be hogging so much cpu.

I'm so desperate about this that I put out a call for a specialist. One person said he has a php programming specialist on staff and that it would cost about $300 to fix. Another person said the only real way to get to the bottom of the problem was to go through technological support here at hostican.

I have called support twice now, and made very little progress. If I knew for sure the php programmer could isolate and fix the problem, I'd find the money. But I don't know that.

Any suggestions would be very, very welcome. This is happening at the worst possible time, business wise.

www.rosinalippi.com/weblog

[tlk]

I was having the same problem. Last 300 Visitors showed a bombardment of hits to wp-trackback.php. Bad Behavior wasn't able to block it, so I ended up renaming the file so it couldn't be accessed. That means I can't receive trackbacks, but my site is now staying up. It's a good trade-off.

Does anyone know of another way to block this?

[rosinalippi]

tlk -- If it were just trackbacks I could take care of it as you describe, but this is the index.php file that's getting hit.

Things seem to have settled down, but then I stripped everything out of index.php but the barebones. I'd like to try to put some basic features back in, but I'm afraid the whole thing will start all over again. There's got to be a better way to fix this problem. I get a healthy but not outrageous amount of traffic. As things continue to grow, what kind of problems will I be facing?

[rosinalippi]

I've been doing more investigating of this cpu problem (which is still happening -- a day or two of no problems and then bam, I get locked out for fixing a typo).

As a part of this I've been communicating with the person who designed the Rapid Access template for WordPress (which is what I use). Here's what he had to say:

My personal site is about 86 php calls in 1.0 seconds. My business site shows 293 in 0.383, I'm pretty sure that's on its own server or it's extremely well managed. (I don't pay the server bill).

Yours is showing 29 php calls in 1.3 seconds. Unless you see some anomaly in the stats I would say it's something in the server.

The question is now, how to find out if there's something going on with the server?

I wish someone from HostICan would chime in here.

[ayashi]

yep, I'm having the same problem after upgrading to wordpress 2.3, yet I still can't find the solution of this. After installing wp-super-cache plugin, those overload message doesn't appear as much as it used to. Should we just sit around and wait for wordpress update ? Or is there anyone know how to solve this ? Because hostican doesn't tell me which query or function that cause this, but only information that overload happens because of index.php

[Shazam]

Originally Posted by ayashi

yep, I'm having the same problem after upgrading to wordpress 2.3, yet I still can't find the solution of this. After installing wp-super-cache plugin, those overload message doesn't appear as much as it used to. Should we just sit around and wait for wordpress update ? Or is there anyone know how to solve this ? Because hostican doesn't tell me which query or function that cause this, but only information that overload happens because of index.php

You need to check your logs to see where the problems are happening. That way, you can isolate the possible cause of this usage spike.

[thelocomono]

Originally Posted by rosinalippi

I've been doing more investigating of this cpu problem (which is still happening -- a day or two of no problems and then bam, I get locked out for fixing a typo).

As a part of this I've been communicating with the person who designed the Rapid Access template for WordPress (which is what I use). Here's what he had to say:



The question is now, how to find out if there's something going on with the server?

I wish someone from HostICan would chime in here.

Can someone explain what this php call he is talking about?

[ayashi]

Originally Posted by Shazam

You need to check your logs to see where the problems are happening. That way, you can isolate the possible cause of this usage spike.

shazam, the problem is on the index.php, sometimes it takes quite too long to access it, for example this log :
[04/Feb/2008:20:55:23 -0500] 77.91.224.5 [url=http://www.abc.com]mytitle/url] /home/abccom/public_html/index.php 0.478927

the support told me that it means it took 40 seconds just to load the index.php,
but I don't know why it took so long.