My Wordpress is a CPU hog - Site suspended by Hostgator

I have a resellers account with hostgator and they like to suspend me about once or twice a month. I have optimized my site to be as resource efficient as best as it can. I use wp-super-cache and just added db-cache-reloaded last night.

The culprit plugin that hostgator seems to find in the logs is max-banner-ads-pro by MaxBlogPress. I contacted MaxBlogPress in their support forum and the tech said it's hostgator's issue. They said max-banner-pro is built to be resource friendly. They said I'm the only complaint they've ever encountered at maxblogpress for such issue. If anyone is familiar with MaxBlogPress, you'd know they are a popular plugin and seem to well liked and used by many wordpress admins.

At this point I don't know what else to do or where else to turn. I can disable the max-banner-pro plugin that I purchased, but it's the most important plugin I have to generate revenue.

Option B is to get a dedicated server (VPS won't work either because shared memory). I can't afford $200 month for a dedicated server.

I started looking into other ad management systems such as google admanager and openX, but they look confusing and openX installs on my server, which I read is another resource hog.

Like I said, I have a resellers package at hostgator and cache plugins. Don't know what else to do.

 

If you can't figure out how to lower your CPU usage I suggest to go with AdManager, it's a little bit confusing at the beginning but you will get used to it.

 

Admanager is google, right? I made an account last night and worked on it for a few hours. It wouldn't let me ad CJ html code. It only allows me to use adsense code. Unless I am doing something wrong. It's not very intuitive.

Also, I've been looking for a way to add the ad zone code in each blog post. With max banner I can just add
<div style="”display:block;float:right;margin:"><!--MBA:Zone=1--></div> into the post to align it in the text.

Looks like admanager has a long string of code that probably isn't meant to be added in the blog post individually?

 

I know you said that you have wp-super-cache installed but is it actually working? A lot of installs I've seen it's installed but not saving the outputted cached files. Are you running it in half (ie wp-cache) mode or full mode? What other plugins are you using?

Can we get a url to your site? (At the very least we can look at Google cache and see if there's anything of notice that we can flag)

 

Well, wp-super-cache did work when hostgator first installed it. Then later on I set it to 'half on' because new posts weren't updating in IE. I want visitors to see new posts now, not old posts from 7-days ago. That's my biggest gripe about wp-super-cache is it takes a couple of weeks for new posts to appear in IE. Making returning visitors think my website is dead when it's not, it's updated 4-5 times per day.

Hostgator suspended me for having it 'half on'. So I turned it full on and it didn't work. So they had to uninstall it and reinstall it to get it to work again. Since then, my site has been having 500 errors of often (to often for me). I contacted hostgator again and they said wp-super-cache is working, but the max-banner-ads is still consuming too much processor which was causing 500 errors.

My site is http://gear-vault.com

 

This is why giving an URL is so important when asking for help.

You have two different caching programs in place, wp-super-cache and DB Cache Reloaded. Just one or the other should be fine. They may be causing a conflict as they try to cache each other.

You also have WassUp plugin installed. Do you really need it? You already have analytics in there and the queries can be better servered. Remove it and place the following line in the footer.php of your theme before the closing body tag.

<!-- <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries. <?php timer_stop(1); ?> seconds. --> 

Code (markup):

Every time you install yet another plugin, it;s adding queries to the count. It's easier just to add in the code directly instead of yet another plugin file.

You have two broken images being reported. Find them or remove references of them from within the theme as your webserver has to add them to the 404 report every time they're called:

http://www.gear-vault.com/wp-content/themes/revolution_magazine-40/images/navsubhover~.gif

http://www.gear-vault.com/wp-content/themes/images/leader-dots.gif

This image is 115kB in size. Can you reduce it 30% and stretch it out?

http://www.gear-vault.com/wp-content/themes/revolution_magazine-40/images/bg.png

And why it it named a *.png file when it's being reported as a *.jpg?

The website analysier is reporting a total of 64 items on your front page, 49 of them being images. That's rather high. Anything you can get rid of?

6 *.css files. Can you combine them all into a single file?

7 javascript files. Again can you combine them? Remember that the webserver has to serve each and every one of those every time the site loads. And those are nearly 100kB is size.

Also when you see the 500 error in the webserver logs, what is the specific errors that you are receiving?

 

Wow, that's a lot of stuff and most of it is Japanese language to me. I might need to hire someone to do that.

I deactivated Wassup. I use it because it gives me real time traffic and the link source they are coming from. Handy tool to stay on top of the action. I fixed the two broken images and added the code in the footer.php. I have no idea on the rest of the stuff.

Oh, I just added db-cache-reloaded this morning. The author said it works awesome with wp-super-cache. The site was lagging before installing it, now it's 5x faster (imo)

 

Thanks for looking at my site so deep. I'll need to research how do a lot of that stuff. It's probably really simple if you know what you're doing.

rep added.

 

It is and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask. I know it gets confusing when you get in deep with thsi stuff.

Sounds like it when I went looking at it but 1) We're trying to keep your site up right now, 2) link source (also called referrer just to let you know) is also provided by Analytics and may even by somethng on your backend like awstats.

Cool.

That's fine. Really sounds like wp-super-cache may not have been working then. Can you poke around wp-content/cache and see if both directories and files are being created and they're larger than 0kb? The files will have really weird names like a66e44736e753d4533746ced572ca821.php.

And thanks for the rep.

edit: One more thing you can do is remove the All in One SEO plugin. Some hosts don;t like it (Dreamhost flat out bans it) as it's known for overtaxing sites. If the site is still an issue, turning that off would be my next step.

Example reference: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/344013

 

1. Can you try installing PHP Speedy plugin and give it a try. It has helped me to bring my site 2X faster by combining all CSS and JS together for all the plugins...

2. Do u gzip the files before sending it as response. Its the safe way to speed up your site performance.

3. Try to have low outbound links to reduce DNS lookup

4. If you can get some CSS Sprite help to reduce the image loading time, it can help u a lot. (I am currently working on this to get YSlow score A. Currently its C)

5. Add some subdomains to keep the CSS and JS scripts. It will help in getting site loads quickly as there can be max 2 HTTP request to a single domain.

Do above and I am sure u will be happy. PM me if u need any specific help

 

That's what I was suggesting up there although doing it manually. I *believe* this is the latest version:

http://aciddrop.com/2009/02/02/php-speedy-wp-052-bug-fix/

We're not talking about site performance here, we're talking about how the site is affecting server load. gzip'ing would increase load. Gotta disagree with that suggestion. wp-super-cache is probably doing it anyway if it's working correctly.

And the other suggestions are about site speed, not server load as well.

 

oh i got a bit confused there... one BIG way to decrease server load is hosting images on some image sharing site... try imageshack.us
it will reduce load on ur server for sure

 

Hey guys, my account was suspended again today. I made some of the changes as suggested but hostgator keeps pointing out max-banner-ads as the issue. They are sending me logs and it's all max-banner-ads. I think I need to focus on that issue to find a solution.

 

Hostgator said I just need to find an alternative to Max-Banner-Ads-Pro plugin and my site will be fine.

What is an alternative to Max-Banner-ads-pro? I paid for this plugin and I am getting very little support from them. I can't understand why I am the only person in the world having Max-Banner-Ads issues. They have a support forum and I did a search to find similar issues, I am the only one to report such issues.

 

Can you send them to me please?

http://drmikessteakdinner.com/contact.html

Ignore the $85 fee on that page as I've requested you to send me the files. That;s for people who just send me requests out of the blue.

 

I sent you the info.

Hostgator support offered this information. Not sure what it means:

 

If blogging is your only passion, and you have no idea about what HTML, CSS, PHP, FTP, MySQL is, you need wordpress

 

your my-sql databse is using more than 15% ..................................processing.........i think so

 

I don't know if the issues are solved but I installed a plugin called TPC! Memory Usage and I'm using about 21MB of memory. I think that is better. It peaked at 28MB this morning.

I did a lot of clean ups using other mods such as wp-clean-options and delete-revision-manager. Actually, I found this site that offers 8-tips to help keep your wordpress going strong. I had no idea that these little things could become an issue.

My site had

468 rows in options tables ( deleted 130 rows with wp-clean-options)
570 unused images ( I deleted all unused images)
1500 revisions (I deleted all revisions)
Optimized database with WP-DBmanager.

Another issue was "recent posts" in the widgets area was consuming a lot of resources, so I deleted that from widgets.

I also think "similar posts" is causing a lot of memory usage. I was told there's a way to parse this to it only detects 3 months instead of 2 years. I guess if it searches more posts it strains the processor?

 

Just use OIO Publisher plugin for managing ads. I don't think it is worth it to keep one plugin and have your site suspended multiple times.