WordPress High CPU Load and Resource Usage Problem – Again!

Hello all!

I have 5 wordpress websites (all running version 2.9.2) which get a total of 5,000 – 7,000 visitors and 15,000 to 20,000 pageviews daily. In the last few weeks I’ve been getting Resource usage warnings from my host and despite implementing WP-Super Cache and going though all the motions for optimizing wordpress which I could find online, it still did not solve the problem and my account has just been suspended.

I’m on a “Semi-Dedicated” hosting plan which, according to the hosting company, is a step higher from the regular cheap shared hosting and should have the capacity to handle this amount of WordPress traffic. In the words of their representative : “I would think that WP Caching would help to prevent this sort of thing so you may want to check and make sure that you have the caching set up properly.“

The problem now is that I can’t pinpoint the exact cause of this high resource problem and I seem to have tried every optimisation technique I could find (including caching) without getting the desired result. Below is the usage log excerpt showing some problematic queries which I was provided with but I’m not really very advanced in WordPress and SQL stuff to make much sense of these queries.

I’d love for someone to help me out and would also be grateful for any pointers to good reliable hosts that might be able to handle this sort of load on a plan that costs not more than $30/month (My current “semi-dedicated” plan costs $20 / Mo)

—– EXCERPT OF MESSAGE FROM MY HOST ———–

The account was causing load issues again and I see numerous slow queries in the log:

# User@Host: myuser_wrdp1[myuser_wrdp1] @ localhost []
# Query_time: 15 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 224 Rows_examined: 830
use myuser_wrdp1;
SELECT post_title, DAYOFMONTH(post_date) as dom FROM wp_posts WHERE YEAR(post_date) = ‘2010’ AND MONTH(post_date) = ’05’ AND post_date < ‘2010-05-27 13:41:04’ AND post_type = ‘post’ AND post_status = ‘publish’;

# Time: 100527 8:42:19
# User@Host: myuser_wrdp6[myuser_wrdp6] @ localhost []
# Query_time: 24 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 1 Rows_examined: 5580
use myuser_wrdp6;
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ AND (wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’) ORDER BY wp_posts.ID ASC LIMIT 0, 1;

# Time: 100527 8:42:43
# User@Host: myuser_wrdp5[myuser_wrdp5] @ localhost []
# Query_time: 12 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 992 Rows_examined: 5017
use myuser_wrdp5;
SELECT post_title, DAYOFMONTH(post_date) as dom FROM wp_posts WHERE YEAR(post_date) = ‘2010’ AND MONTH(post_date) = ’05’ AND post_date < ‘2010-05-27 12:42:30’ AND post_type = ‘post’ AND post_status = ‘publish’;

# User@Host: myuser_wrdp5[myuser_wrdp5] @ localhost []
# Query_time: 13 Lock_time: 0 Rows_sent: 992 Rows_examined: 5017
SELECT post_title, DAYOFMONTH(post_date) as dom FROM wp_posts WHERE YEAR(post_date) = ‘2010’ AND MONTH(post_date) = ’05’ AND post_date < ‘2010-05-27 12:42:30’ AND post_type = ‘post’ AND post_status = ‘publish’;

———- EXCERPT END ————

MY PLUGINS
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And below are a list of the plugins I use (all updated):

Akismet

Blog Protector

Comment Email Responder

Customizable Post Listings

Dagon Design Form Mailer

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

Future Calendar

Google XML Sitemaps

Infolinks In Text Ads

Old Post Notifier

OptinPop

Post-Plugin Library

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