MailPoet3 and SiteGround

Resolved perchpole
(@perchpole)

6 years, 7 months ago

Hello, All –

I’ve reported this before but things have now come to a head. Yesterday, the web hosts, SiteGround, turned off my website. They claimed that I had violated their terms of service which are:

No more than 40,000 CPU seconds for any given calendar day;
No more than 40,000 script or program executions for any given calendar day;

They claimed that I had consumed more than 105615 CPU seconds for the last 24 hours.

After some investigation (thanks to their very good support) MailPoet 3 was found to be the culprit. MailPoet was deactivated and the CPU usage went back to normal.

My site is set-up to send Post Notifications (only) at 8am every day if new stories have been posted. There are approx 200 subscribers. On the day in question, no notification was sent.

I want to keep using MailPoet (I have used it with other hosts without problems) but there is clearly an issue that needs to be resolved. SiteGround have suggested that MailPoet is running too many cron jobs. If true, this is completely unnecessary in my case. I only need one cron job a day – at 8am!

What can I do to cut down on the CPU usage?

Antar

Viewing 12 replies - 1 through 12 (of 12 total)

lynnmonk
(@lynnmonk)

6 years, 7 months ago

I too have run into similar problems with my host for the site I am running mailpoet premium with your new sending service on. My other sites that are using mailpoet with my hosts smtp seem to be fine. Could it be that the sending service is the culprit?

Wysija
(@wysija)

6 years, 7 months ago

SiteGround is an incompatible host with the “MailPoet’s own script” option, read here: http://beta.docs.mailpoet.com/article/131-hosts-which-mailpoet-task-scheduler-wont-work

Thread Starter perchpole
(@perchpole)

6 years, 7 months ago

In my case, I was not using “MailPoet’s own script”. I was using the “Visitors to your Website” option – and it was still blowing the CPU!

easternkicks
(@easternkicks)

6 years, 6 months ago

I’ve had exactly the same problem. I was also not using “MailPoet’s own script” but this still blew up my CPU usage on SiteGround after installing the final (non-beta) version 3 on my site and they’ve taken me offline at least twice!

I installed on Thursday, when I saw a massive spike after setting up an email. This has been ongoing since the send, and not come down since. (Even though I only send one email to 450 subscribers once a week!)

Having tried to trouble shoot, deactivating the plugin has brought the CPU usage down to 10-15% of what it was!

Obviously something is very wrong with this set up – please fix!!

Thread Starter perchpole
(@perchpole)

6 years, 6 months ago

I don’t think there is any support here. I’ve fixed my problem by going to MailChimp. All issues sorted at a stroke.

easternkicks
(@easternkicks)

6 years, 6 months ago

Hmmm… seems that way?

lynnmonk
(@lynnmonk)

6 years, 6 months ago

I have the same issue but I am hosted with Dreamhost. Although they have not yet taken this particular site down, I have received numerous emails informing me that this particular site is exceeding memory limits. At first I assumed it was the sending service as I have used Mailpoet 2 for some time without any problems, so I switched over to the alternative sending option. As my site is new and has very few visitors, I was apprehensive that my emails wouldn’t get sent on time.

Switching over to the “Visitors to your website” option has brought the memory usage down by about 60%, but it is still exceeding limits. I don’t know what else to do. I have about a dozen other sites on the same hosting plan running Mailpoet 2 and have had no CPU problems. I was really looking forward to solving all my previous sending issues by using the new Mailpoet Sending service.

There is something seriously wrong with the CPU usage of Mailpoet 3 that needs to be fixed ASAP. I paid for a year’s premium account with the sending service and at present I can’t use it, even though the site in question only has 8 subscribers! I need something that will reliably run my newsletter and email campaigns on around 20 different websites. This trial on one site isn’t going well. I’ll be demanding a refund, and will have to find an alternative if this issue isn’t acknowledged.

easternkicks
(@easternkicks)

6 years, 6 months ago

@lynnmonk Please see this ticket, which I opened as Mailpoet decided to ‘Resolve’ this despite not waiting for the original poster to respond!

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mailpoet-3-and-cpu-usage/

So far they don’t seem to be taking any responsibility for this issue, let alone resolving it.

Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
(@ipstenu)

🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

6 years, 6 months ago

It sounds like the “Visitors to your site” option may be over aggressive with regards to WP cron.

tl;dr WP Cron runs every time anyone visits your site. It checks for scheduled processes to run, if they need to be run, and runs them. It’s not incredibly deep 🙂

When I heard about issues with a cron job running too many processes, my inclination is that they’re running too often. However looking at the code a little, I think this is actually just running a check on every visit instead of telling it something like ‘check once an hour’ so every single visit runs their whole home-brew cron check. Which means the ‘difference’ between their cron and using WP’s cron is pretty minimal, and that’s possibly why you’re not seeing as much reduction in CPU as possible.

I did not do a full top-down review of the way the code works, that would take a few DAYS not the hour I had to read through it. @wysija – it sure sounds like your cron is a bit too aggro. Maybe dial it back a bit and check less often? The check for tasks seems to be the issue itself.

lynnmonk
(@lynnmonk)

6 years, 6 months ago

@ipstenu – I don’t think that is the whole issue. My site is new. I’m lucky if I get 4 unique visitors per day. Although it brought the CPU use down by about 60% it is still using far too much. I am running several other sites with Mailpoet 2 on the same shared hosting plan and I get no CPU issues with them despite them being much busier sites.

Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
(@ipstenu)

🏳️‍🌈 Advisor and Activist

6 years, 6 months ago

That’s why I think something’s wrong in their code running too much 🙂 We’re actually in agreement here. Something in their setup is being overly aggressive with cron.

easternkicks
(@easternkicks)

6 years, 6 months ago

I agree with you @ipstenu, except FYI I’ve actually disabled WP Cron and have created a cron job in admin.

Remember, the support here have marked this ticket as resolved, so they’re not going to look at any comments here. Please add them to this ticket which is still in progress:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mailpoet-3-and-cpu-usage/