• When I am working in the back end of my site, usually when either saving a post or deleting a post, the site often hangs up.

    Frequently, it gives me a 500 error, and both the site and WHM lock up for up to 15 minutes.

    My hosting service told me to watch the “Process Manager” in WHM. I did. At the next hangup, I observed:

    /usr/bin/php /home/XXXXXXXX/public_html/wordpress/wp-cron.php was using 86% of CPU, but only 4.1% of memory.

    /usr/bin/php /home/XXXXXXXX/public_html/index.php was using 40.5% CPU, and 3.9% of memory.

    /usr/bin/php /home/XXXXXXX/public_html/index.php was using 11.8% CPU, and 4.1% of memory.

    These were all well above the normal CPU usage.

    Anyone have an idea of what would cause such a problem?

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  • There are lots of variables that could cause excessive memory. By default WordPress tries to scale to 32MB before you receive that warning. Depending on your hosts setup and enviroment you may be able to override this and increase the amount with the following snippet in the wp.config file:

    /* Increase memory allowance */
    define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '128M');

    I wouldn’t go above 128M. You could also try 64M, 96M etc.

    Thread Starter jnnydnti

    (@jnnydnti)

    Thanks, but that’s been set to 128MB for a couple of years.

    It’s overloading the CPU.

    What size is your WordPress site, hosting environment, shared, vps etc ram allocation, cpu cycles? There are so many variables based on the little information provided it’s hard to respond with anything but generic suggestions to narrow things down right now.

    I would start by optimising the database, deleting old post revisions, cleaning the trash.

    Load up one of the Memory usage plugins.

    Try disabling all plugins, and do some more monitoring a poorly coded plugin could easily be the cause, same with poorly optimised themes that use inappropriate and often expensive database queries. Depending on the environment of your site it may be worth creating a clone on a dev url you can troubleshoot on then pushing to the live site.

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

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