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Avoid CPU Overload

September 23rd, 2008 · by David Bradley >> 13 Comments

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cpu-overloadSometimes if your blog is running hot, with lots of visitors, lots of commenting, and generally lots of activity, the host server will be overloaded by all the computational demands on it. Mosts web hosts will disable your blog if you break through a cap on CPU usage on their machines. Sometimes it can be temporary, resetting automatically after a few minutes, sometimes it can be permanent and require you to talk to the host about measures you will take to prevent it happening again.

So, how can you prevent CPU overload on a blog with lots of plugins and a hefty database. CPU overload happens on the server when scripts and plugins use up too many resources on shared web hosting and often lead to financial penalties from your web host or worse still downtime or even your site being disabled permanently. This can happen if you’re running a backup and have a huge database or if your site gets a traffic spike from Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz or elsewhere.

The first thing to try is to disable any plugins you don’t really need. Next, make sure you have the latest versions of plugins you really do need and that any caching or load-reducing options are enabled. This is especially true for a translation plugin like Angsuman’s Translator Pro (the latest version has protection against CPU overload built in now). Make sure any plugins you are running are not calling on other overloaded sites and leading to heavy timeouts. Also, make sure you’re running the latest version of your blogging software.

Next, install the very latest version of a (Wordpress) caching plugin and make sure it’s operating in fully active mode.

The Bad Behavior plugin may also be a useful option, it “blocks” bad traffic, such as blog comment spam, web logs spams, and other resource-hogging accesses to your site.

You may wish to run a plugin that searches for orphaned database entries in your MySQL database (the underlying data for your Wordpress blog).

Finally, for those with access to phpMyAdmin via their web hosting Control Panel and thus their MySQL databases, you should run a repair on the blog database and then run the optimize command.

As a last resort, if you cannot overcome your CPU usage issues and are getting continual downtime penalties and warnings from your host you should consider either upgrading to a non-shared hosting account or switching to a more robust company. Bluehost is allegedly bad for CPU over-use issues, although any outages last only a few minutes rather than being permanent. Hostgator is meant to be better, but do your own research into which gives best value for money. Alternatively, you could switch to a dedicated server and not have to worry about sharing CPU resources with other websites ever again.

Thanks to D Holowiski for providing some of the tips for this post.

13 responses so far ↓

  • Mohd Atif // Sep 23, 2008 at 3:35 pm

    CPU Optimization seems to be a hot topic on all the blogs these days..

    Yeah and thanks for tips David

  • David Bradley // Sep 23, 2008 at 5:20 pm

    Mohd, is it? I’ve not seen it mentioned elsewhere at all. By the way what’s are “techytuts”?

  • David Bradley // Sep 23, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    Mohd, is it? I’ve not seen it mentioned elsewhere at all. By the way what are “techytuts”?

  • Wayne Smallman // Sep 27, 2008 at 9:53 am

    There is another option.

    You can save the page in question as HTML and upload as a static page.

    However, here’s where you’d need my level of skill to make the edits to your .htaccess file(s), to your blog and to the HTML page itself…

  • David Bradley // Sep 28, 2008 at 7:47 pm

    You could…but then you lose all the interactivity unless you want to program each page to have comments/polls/pings/trackbacks/tagclouds etc. Although that said, the non-blog pages on my Sciencebase site are like that, static content that simply calls the WP CSS for layout.

  • Mohd Atif // Oct 10, 2008 at 10:11 am

    Well I can give you instances but I have seen similar content on many blogs. Especially for handling the DIGG Effect.

    Techytuts, we’re a blog giving tutorials about computers and internet :)

  • David Bradley // Oct 10, 2008 at 11:57 am

    @Mohd Okay fair enough, I just haven’t seen many bloggers talking about it. You couldn’t pipe across a few links could you, be very useful to see what others are saying on this topic.

    Meanwhile, I get the “Techy” bit, but what are “tuts”?

  • Mohd Atif // Oct 25, 2008 at 11:41 am

    Techy is something related to techology and tuts is something like tutorials.. You may consider it an abbreviation :)

  • David Bradley // Oct 25, 2008 at 1:19 pm

    Ah, okay…tuts…tutorials…I had it in mind that it was some kind of 1920s gangster slang ;-)

  • Dave Holowiski // Apr 22, 2009 at 3:53 am

    Hey, I’m D Holowiski! You’re welcome, I hope these tips helped people out.

  • David Bradley // Apr 22, 2009 at 10:11 am

    I’m sure they did Dave. Thanks!

  • Inglid // Sep 4, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    Ótimo post, já tive problemas 2 vezes e mudei de host agora… Vou seguir essas dicas e ver se funciona.

    Parabéns pelo Post

  • Felix // Nov 20, 2009 at 11:02 pm

    A friend of mine shifted to Hostgator’s dedicated server and still suffer from the said CPU overload problem using Wordpress. I don’t know if the problem is with Hostgator or WP. But my site is on Bluehost and didn’t find any problem with their shared hosting.

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