XF 1.5 Extremely high CPU usage - don't want to get suspended again!

[Cassandra]

Hi,

I have a xenforo+wordpress setup installation.
In the past month I started to notice a huge spike in CPU load. It mainly happens when I have around 400 users connected simultaneously, 75% of which are bots.
It was too much for my 2 CPU cores host and they simply suspended my account for exceeding the CPU usage limit.
So I moved to another host, this time with 4 CPU cores. And now I seem to be reaching the limit there as well !!!
I know for certain that xenforo is causing this, because when I make the board inactive CPU load goes down significantly.
From what I can surmise, forum/index.php is the main cause for high CPU load.
What steps can I take to reduce this load and improve efficiency?
Sever Error Log shows no errors.
Thank you

 

[Cassandra]

Should have a system admin look into it.

Can you recommend someone? I'll pay of course.

Isn't someone else using your site's resources? Isn't it hacked?

I don't think so. Scanned all files. When I deactivate the xenforo board CPU usage goes back to normal.

 

[Ozzy47]

I would say contact @MySiteGuy or @Claudio as suggested earlier.

 

[Slavik]

It appears that you have no guest page caching ongoing (which, as you are on litespeed you should be able to make use of their caches), which if youre being hammered by bots could certainly cause an issue.

Feel free to start a PM, I can take a look into it for you.

Upgrading to 2.x would certainly help with out the box guest page caching.

 

[Cassandra]

Its interesting that the more CPU I add, the more googlebots I seem to have. Curently: 38 members, 66 guests, 322(!) bots.

 

[Cassandra]

Just wanted to thank @Slavik for solving the issue for me! Thanks @all for your insightful comments too.

 

[Slavik]

Just wanted to thank @Slavik for solving the issue for me! Thanks @all for your insightful comments too.

You're welcome

 

[sbj]

And, what was the issue?

 

[Slavik]

And, what was the issue?

Config settings needed tweaking.

 

[snoopy5]

Config settings needed tweaking.

Could you please explain what you did change?

I have a similar issue with 8GB RAM and my webhoster claims that XF 2.1x needs at least 16GB of RAM to avoid MySQL crashes. See here.

 

[Slavik]

Could you please explain what you did change?

I have a similar issue with 8GB RAM and my webhoster claims that XF 2.1x needs at least 16GB of RAM to avoid MySQL crashes. See here.

I dont recall exactly, but it was just going over settings that needed tweaking. When you work with so many XenForo boards you just get an eye for things that arent right.