Support » Fixing WordPress » Help with High Memory Usage Due to Spammers

  • My family has a couple of WordPress blogs and they are hosted on a VPS server with 1.5GB RAM. The server appears to be running out of memory and killing processes and my hosting provider told me that this is due to high level of suspicous looking traffic incoming to one blog (it seems like those are some sort of spam bots).

    Is there any way to prevent these spammers to use so much of my VPS RAM? There are some plugins that fight with spam, but would they actually reduce memory usage or just block spam comments? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am looking for any possible solution. Feel free to be specific. Thanks

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  • Matt Knowles

    (@aestheticdesign)

    First you need to identify where the traffic is coming from. Is it all one IP address, many from one block or is it widespread? Can you identify the User Agent that’s causing the problem?

    For that you will need access to the raw log files. What I usually do is sort the log file first by IP address and look for large blocks of the same IP address and investigate those.

    I’ve had problems before where it was actually Microsoft’s BingBot causing the problem when they repeatedly and viciously crawled sites that were using Timely’s calendar plugin.

    If you find the traffic is being caused by visitors you don’t want, you can block them using your .htaccess file, either by IP or User Agent.

    If you find the traffic is from visitors you do want like BingBot, but they’re going crazy, then configuring your robots.txt file is the way to go. You can either disallow them completely out of areas they cause trouble in, or you can add a delay so they don’t try to search the whole site at once.

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