Notice Site Crash Detail

[Keith]

Guys, the long lost admin has returned!

We've had the site go down recently which was due to 2 things. One was we were too bloated having 22 gigs of build files and there was an overload on the CPU. The files I can sort out but the CPU I am not sure about.

We may want to look to updating the software as this version is a bit old but doing so will probably break the theme so whats's everyone thoughts on that?

Alternatively, anyone know what could be causing the server CPU to spike?

 

[Cerez]

This may help:

Reduce High cPanel CPU Usage in Shared Hosting | Logical Nerds

You should be able to check logged CPU usage and spikes in the logs, and investigate what caused them (usually just by manually examining the raw logs). Crawlers and bots hammering the site are usually a cause when the site is PHP-based and generating content/pages on the server-side. For each request that a crawler/bot makes, the server needs to render the page. And bots/crawlers may make hundreds of requests per second.

Enabling PHP caching on the server may also be advisable -- if this hasn't been done yet (ask the web host):

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A faster website with PHP cache & object caching | Web Development Blog

The bigger a PHP and MySQL-based site gets, the more important enabling this caching is -- to relieve the CPU.

 

[Cerez]

Also if you're running file sharing and website/forums hosting on the same server, that's generally a bad idea -- especially if you are doing versioning (like a Git repository) for file sharing. File download servers are usually optimised quite differently to regular web servers -- to account for the difference in the nature of the download and usage.

A lot of saturated download and upload -- change -- requests can really slow down the server (as in when syncing files). And if the server gets bogged down with processing the file changes, the forums software may crash, not having enough resources to run efficiently (access the database, render pages, and process user input/posts).

Just a couple of tips. Let me know if you need more help. (I've worked as a professional website administrator for nearly a decade.)