Site Keeps Crashing - Why do I keep exceeding resources?

Hensmon

Hensmon

Member
I've been running my site since 2020 and never had issues, but in the last 3 months its been non-stop 500 errors and site crashes. When I look at my c-panel it's clear why - We've maxed out on memory, processes and CPU. My forum does not have much traffic, maybe 150 unique users that login per day.

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I've tried a few things. I upgraded my hosting plan from 'small' to 'large'. I signed up to Ccloudflare and turned on all their reccomended settings. I bought Cloudflare addons for site speed. I set up rules to block certain bot IPs. At this point I have reached my technical understanding and have no idea why I use my resources like this, and how I would make progress to resolve this issue. Any help from members here would be greatly appreciated.

Forum in question is trancefix.nl

Henry
 
Clearly your server cannot cope with the amount of CPU / memory usage. Previously you also had bandwidth issues causing disruption.
As you are running a music oriented website, I suspect that you have multimedia processes / integrations running?

Consider to contact @MattW to see if your current hosting suits your needs and potentially get better hosting configuration setup.

Some obvious steps to take:
  1. Disable all plugins (except and see if that improves the situation.
  2. Set cloudflare to Under attack.
  3. Check your CF logs to see if there are any suspicious things going on and block any attackers.
 
Thanks for the suggestions @Alpha1. It is a music orientated website, but the extent of which we process media is embedded youtube, soundcloud and bandcamp links. That's been the case for 4 years with no issues. Same for plug-ins. I do have some, but no new ones in over 12 months.

I will set cloudflare to under attack. I also noticed in my CF events that one IP had made 12.5k calls in the last 24 hours. I assume that alone could cause the issue? (a few others were also hitting around 1-2k). Unique visitors is at 60.5k in 24 hours. I have added the biggest contributing IPs to block lists.
 
Yes, that can certainly be the issue. Mind that AI bots are slurping all data, so this might be a cause of server resources maxing out. Especially if some of the addons or integrations have slow queries. AI bots using your site will only increase in time.
One thing you can also do is to install @Xon 's slow query monitor:
Resource icon X

Slow query logger

Generate a stack trace on slow queries

Keep in mind that this will further tax your server.

1GB RAM is really low. 128GB RAM would be better.
 
Bots happen. My server was attacked. The server load was enormous as the firewall was working.
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yeah things have gotten crazy. if you do not care about ai services, block all of them using ai crawl control in cloudflare. turn on edge caching using digitalpoint addon. and keep an eye on the bots/guest visitor page and look at ip ranges that appears to be in bulk... block asn using cloudflare again. worst case scenario, keep the i'm under attack option enabled permanently or during crazy load periods.
 
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Their VPS offering right now is extremely difficult to beat:

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I'm using this plan to host a XenForo forum that's having 1.5-2M page views daily.

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