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Hi there
I made a small Drupal website 5 years ago, hosted with a respectable German host, on shared servers. 2 years ago, I moved 2 add-on domains of WordPress sites, both quite small, each with not much guest traffic, i.e, mostly under 100/day. All peacefully co-existed and run well and resource overuse was never an issue. In 2018, I have Jetpack monitor reporting twice sites not loading for a brief period.
Then since the beginning of this year, I got gradually increasing Jetpack monitor alerts for one or both of the WordPress sites and a couple of weeks ago, I noted I would get some every few days, but did not take this too seriously, because I thought it would go away. I would have this about once or twice a year at previous host.
2 of these sites, one Drupal based, the other WordPress had hardly got any content or structural changes in this time, just updates.
With the other one a bit, playing with some plugins, mostly optimization and security related to prevent incessant spam-bot registration and login-attempts and improve speed, etc. That was latest, several months ago. Same with content.
Then I noted Jetpack monitor started bombarding my mail with alerts of site(s) not loading/back practically several times an hour on 4th/5th January, which would mostly make the 3 sites, sharing an account extremely slow or inaccessible because of resource overuse. I checked the Cpanel and noticed IOPS was very frequently at or towards 100%, O/I same and frequently, entry processes and CPU also going towards maximum.
Since apart from usual WordPress updates, I have not done anything, let alone beginning 4th July, this got me very alarmed. I thought the web host could have made some changes on resource availability, etc, but they say they see nothing unusual with my account and just noted high resource use, advising me to see if there’s anything to optimize or if I made any component changes, which would be logical advice.
Then the other day I set the busiest site to maintenance mode and disabled most plugins except 4, including All In One WP Security and Really simple SSL. I left the other WordPress site unchanged, the one with hardly any changes in 2 years, other some anti spam measure improvements. For the Drupal site, I decided to use the opportunity to carry out a planned change to WordPress, taking Drupal offline. The new site does not have much content and has mostly standard WordPress plugins.
Even with just these 2 sites [the third in maintenance + 4 plugins active], as I was working on the latter, repeatedly, I noticed IOPS shooting to 100% and several times, I/O also. At one time, as I decided to carry out an update of 2 plugins of the one WordPress site, the page loading was very slow and I do not know whether this was a co-incidence, but around that time got a Jetpack Monitor alert that the 2 sites were not loading. That process was interrupted by this.
Later, as I decided to carry out a Wordfence scan of the new site, just to check it out, I noted the IOPS also shot into the red, i.e. towards 100%.
In all the 2 years with 3 sites under this account, I have never noticed these values in the red area whenever I visited the Cpanel, which I often do, because there was no reason to, though as said, in the last couple of weeks, the increased resource use should have triggered the Jetpack Monitor alerts.
So whatever is going on, there must be some reason behind this sudden resource use rise, which took a dramatic turn on 4th July which I cannot explain, probably connected to WordPress core 5.2.2 (?), though this was automatically updated, I think or plugins, especially now with Drupal gone and which I think was innocent as it was unchanged for 2 years and not updated for several months.
In the last 2, 3 years, I have always had extra 1 – 3 Drupal/wordpress sites in directories for development/test purposes and this has NEVER had any effect on performance, though currently there are none.
Wordfence shows all files are clean, no malware, etc
Some of the plugins being used are:
- Wordfence security
- Super Cache
- Yoast SEO
- Akismet Anti-Spam
- Google Captcha (reCAPTCHA) by BestWebSoft
- Autoptimize
- Contact Form by BestWebSoft
- Jetpack von WordPress.com
- Official StatCounter Plugin
- No Page Comment
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Really Simple SSL
- Theme My Login
- TinyMCE Advanced
- WP Performance Score Booster
- Leverage Browser Caching
- Classic Editor
- Open external links in a new window
- All In One WP Security [added about a year ago, first on 1 site as part of measures to help combat stubborn spambot registration, login attempts, mail supposedly sent from contact form + some additional features not availed by Wordfence free … with positive results. Now also on the new site as well].
- They all have a gallery plugin, one NextGEN Gallery, the other Photo Gallery, but I think none has required an update for months at least.
Removal or addition of any of the named optimization plugins made a different at Gmetrix.com & Google Page speed insights
The 2 older WordPress sites have ALWAYS had
- Buddypress + BBForum [currently disabled]
- 3 related Web directory plugins: Sabai, Sabai Directory & Sabai Google Maps
- Recently Registered
- SOGO Add Script Header Footer<, needed for some external content/li>
- WP Meta and Date Remover, the other WP Date Remover
- Insert PHP Code Snippet, needed for some external content
Furthermore, the one currently in maintenance mode with just 4 plugins enabled has:
- recipepress reloaded + required Redux Framework
- Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite
- Async JavaScript
- Ad Blocker Notify Lite
- Simple Lightbox
- Ad Blocker Notify Lite
As I’m writing this post, I wanted to check out the plugins of one of them and it’s taking extremely long to load the page.
These are the Cpanel statistics values right right now and is mostly likely related to the slow loading:
Entry Processes: 20 / 20 (100%)
IOPS: 100 / 100 (100%)
Virtual Memory Usage: 868.93 MB / 2 GB (42.43%)
So could someone please help me understand what’s going on and how to solve? I have tried to explain the status quo as much as I know it.
To cap it up:
- the account had 3 peacefully co-existing sites 1 Drupal (replaced the other day with a WordPress version, independent of the issues), the 2 WordPress-based added as add-on domains. there’ no resource related issue for most of the last 2 years, except I guess since Jetpack monitor now & then sent an alert. This slowly, but gradually increased, to a couple every few days.
- Then beginning 4th July, everything changed with the IOPS & I/O etc frequently being so high, that the sites slow or cannot load, with constant alerts from Jetpack.
This has continued, even after disabling almost all plugins on site B and setting to maintenance mode. - In the last 23 hours, with the 2 sites, Jetpack Monitor has fired off 1 – 4 alerts almost every single hour!
- Just before posting this, I disabled almost all plugins on the second site, except 2 and put it in maintenance mode as well, more or less in exasperation. 😉
Please do not suggest changing the shared host or VPS as it’s not an option. The question would be how come there was no issue before?
Your help will very much be appreciated.
Kind regards