XenForo and Wordpress Memory Usage Problems?

[Paradoxer]

My Wordpress based website was recently (December 2017) moved to Web Economy Linux hosting to cPanel Deluxe hosting by GoDaddy. I have a XenForo based forum on a separate database for this website. It does not get much activity at all, but the main website gets a fair amount of traffic.

Ever since the hosting changed, I have had frequent issues with the Memory Usage (1,024 MB max.) and I/O Usage on the website peaking when I publish a post on the main website. I was told by GoDaddy support that this is because of a high amount of traffic (particularly this thread with 10k views) on XenForo.

Is there a known problem with XenForo and Wordpress memory usage? Is there any way for me to verify if my website's forums are indeed the problem?

I have enabled memcached for my forums, which I was suggested to do, but that has not seemed to help.

 

[Optic]

I would focus more on the WordPress site as first as that sounds like the bulk of your activity.

Have you installed a full page caching plugin for WordPress? That will serve static pages for all guests instead of hammering your database per page view.

Also you say IO is peaking, is your plan on non-SSD? If possible I would upgrade to SSD, you’ll see a huge improvement in responsiveness and IO will virtually be a nonissue.

1 GB RAM for 2 web applications + a control panel (assuming you have cPanel as well) would be tight, but really depends what plugins you have active on both apps and also how popular they are on your site..

 

[Paradoxer]

I would focus more on the WordPress site as first as that sounds like the bulk of your activity.

Have you installed a full page caching plugin for WordPress? That will serve static pages for all guests instead of hammering your database per page view.

Also you say IO is peaking, is your plan on non-SSD? If possible I would upgrade to SSD, you’ll see a huge improvement in responsiveness and IO will virtually be a nonissue.

1 GB RAM for 2 web applications + a control panel (assuming you have cPanel as well) would be tight, but really depends what plugins you have active on both apps and also how popular they are on your site..

Thanks for the reply. So my website currently uses W3 Total Cache. I've been using it for a long time, but I've recently been activating and disabling it several times as I've tried troubleshooting the cause of my website's issues.

GoDaddy's only available plans (aside from Managed Wordpress, which I do not need or want) are on non-SSD. I know that it's usually the Memory Usage that exceeds the limit, and then the I/O Usage follows immediately afterwards (this happens when a post with multiple images/embeds on the Wordpress website is published). When the website crashes, I check the processes, and there are far too many going at once. I try to kill them, but they keep coming back, so I always end up needing to disable all of the plugins.

My current plan is Deluxe 2, which I had upgraded from Deluxe once I first started having the issues. I was hoping that would help, but it didn't. I could upgrade to a Deluxe 3 with 2,048 MB of RAM if necessary. I'd just hope that actually fixes the issue and that there's not some other underlying problem.

 

[Optic]

I couldn't find a plan called "Deluxe 2" only Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate.

Looking at their plans I think you've simply outgrown GoDaddy shared hosting:
https://www.godaddy.com/help/resource-limits-12001

They have an odd metric called "Entry Processes (Concurrent Connections)" which is capped at 100 for your plan?

I would start looking at other hosts, maybe even possibly a VPS.

 

[Paradoxer]

I couldn't find a plan called "Deluxe 2" only Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate.

Looking at their plans I think you've simply outgrown GoDaddy shared hosting:
https://www.godaddy.com/help/resource-limits-12001

They have an odd metric called "Entry Processes (Concurrent Connections)" which is capped at 100 for your plan?

I would start looking at other hosts, maybe even possibly a VPS.

So on their "Deluxe" line of cPanel hosting, they have upgrade paths up to "Deluxe 3." What I currently have is "Deluxe 2", with the following specs:

Shared resources

2 CPU cores
1024 MB RAM

24/7 Support
Metered storage
1024 MBps bandwidth

I have 125 "Entry Processes" with my current plan. 1 step above to Deluxe 3 has 2,048 MB RAM, and that seems to be the notable change.

I mainly started the website as a hobby (which is why I went with GoDaddy), but I guess things have grown larger in scope than I had planned for. I'm not even that educated on what a VPS is, but it's something I'll have to look into now that it seems it's something I might need.

Thanks.

 

[Bryan]

I noticed straight away that you have constant hammering, there are currently over 60 guests on your site and over 40 of them say "a moment ago" continually, hammering/site ripping has become very common just lately, you will need to ask your host to prevent hammering.

 

[Paradoxer]

I noticed straight away that you have constant hammering, there are currently over 60 guests on your site and over 40 of them say "a moment ago" continually, hammering/site ripping has become very common just lately, you will need to ask your host to prevent hammering.

Oh that's right, there's 68 guests now. That's definitely not right. So this is essentially a spam issue?

 

[Bryan]

It looks that way but I have limited access, I cannot see the IP addresses, keep an eye on it and see if the same IP addresses are constantly hammering the site. If they are then perhaps start banning them. I would ban them through your hosting control panel rather than xenforo though to reduce the overhead.

 

[Bryan]

There seems to be a new trend of hammering and site ripping, one of the sites I work closely with was being hammered and another forum appeared with the ripped content, obviously they wouldn't have any user data or post data other than what the public can see but it was a fairly convincing copy.

 

[Paradoxer]

It looks that way but I have limited access, I cannot see the IP addresses, keep an eye on it and see if the same IP addresses are constantly hammering the site. If they are then perhaps start banning them. I would ban them through your hosting control panel rather than xenforo though to reduce the overhead.

Thanks, I did just that. I banned two problematic IP ranges through the hosting control panel, and it seems that the number of concurrent guests is dying down, slowly. Looking at the IP addresses for visitors on my main website, it also seems there are a lot of reoccurring addresses in the same range taking up a lot of bandwidth. This could also be related to the hammering issue. I've contacted my hosting about this.

I had been looking into this for a while, but I was only made aware of this from you now, so thanks again.

Edit: That's strange. I blocked all of the IP addresses in the 54.36.148.** range through the hosting control panel's "IP Blocker," and I thought it worked for a bit, but I published a post and numerous guests with that IP have returned. I'm guessing it'll just take some time to properly integrate the change.

 

[WSWD]

Your forum is tiny and should have absolutely no issues running on that hosting. As others have said, my guess would be that WordPress is using the RAM. It's often very RAM hungry as you add plug-ins. The 54.36.148.** range belongs to OVH. Tons of garbage originates from their network. It likely is a server scraping your site, or some unknown search engine, etc. Could also be a small-scale DDoS attack. Any of those will drive up your site's usage.

 

[TPerry]

If on OVH they also have a few IP's that they use to monitor the servers with.

 

[Paradoxer]

If on OVH they also have a few IP's that they use to monitor the servers with.

Are you saying they're a good thing, then? I've blocked 3 IP ranges that have to do with OVH.

 

[Bryan]

Are you saying they're a good thing, then? I've blocked 3 IP ranges that have to do with OVH.

IPs that monitor you don't do so by hammering you and why would OVH be monitoring you in the first place when you're not hosted with them. I have most of OHV blocked as there's a huge amount of rogue servers in their network.

 

[TPerry]

Yep, if you are not on OVH services then they should not be hitting... but that is also why OVH has such a bad rep - they rent to almost anyone that will pay.
I had misunderstood an earlier post and thought it was actually in an OVH environment for the hosting.

 

[WSWD]

Are you saying they're a good thing, then? I've blocked 3 IP ranges that have to do with OVH.

On my personal servers, I have their entire ASNs blocked. Load/spam/probes/attacks almost completely came to an end. Their network is full of abusers, because like @Tracy Perry said, they will rent to almost anyone, and then don't really monitor their network for abuse.

 

[usAdultAds]

Even though this was posted in Jan, I know how the OP feels.

Shared hosting is only good for simple websites, however, people want to keep setting up elaborate sites, and expect shared hosting to cater to their needs, and it does not work this way, and was not designed for this purpose, so I understand where the OP is coming from.

I am on a VPS with 2 cores and 4 gigs of memory. I have all the BW, and HD space I need at the moment, however, it is the memory that continues to give headaches, as you will most likely run out of memory before you run out of BW or HD space.

2 cores
4 gigs of memory

I am running 3 different platforms, and currently, the server is using 50% of the memory.

I am not a VPS guru, so I do not know what to look for, nor do I even know if this is normal or not.