SOS: Nias Online in the State of Excessive CPU Usage

Last Friday (9 October 2009) was a bad day for Nias Online, it was suspended by its host. The reason: Excessive CPU Usage.

The warning about excessive CPU usage from the webhost has been sent to the webmaster (more appropriately: webstudent) for 3 -4 of times since 12 November 2008. Perhaps this time the web host’ patience was up to the limit, although from the communication several hours later with the webhost technical support revealed that the suspension was done automatically by the system when it felt it’s overburdened.

The table shows the historical data of CPU Usage by Nias Online during the past several days. As seen, this small site has overburdened the server for the whole period starting from the day the CPU usage last recorded on 11 September 2009.

2009-09-11 – 259% 2009-09-12 – 266% 2009-09-13 – 236% 2009-09-14 – 219% 2009-09-15 – 211% 2009-09-16 – 206% 2009-09-17 – 196% 2009-09-18 – 174% 2009-09-19 – 165% 2009-09-20 – 156% 2009-09-21 – 146% 2009-09-22 – 128% 2009-09-23 – 140% 2009-09-24 – 144% 2009-09-25 – 136% 2009-09-26 – 129% 2009-09-27 – 127% 2009-09-28 – 129% 2009-09-29 – 138% 2009-09-30 – 135% 2009-10-01 – 132% 2009-10-02 – 131% 2009-10-03 – 149% 2009-10-04 – 156% 2009-10-05 – 160% 2009-10-06 – 184% 2009-10-07 – 194% 2009-10-08 – 192% 2009-10-12 – 168% 2009-10-13 – 161%

Nias Online uses WordPress as its platform for the main reason: it is easy to use, easy to customise, lots of interesting features such as various plugins, free and professional themes. Using WordPress, a very novice blogger can easily sets up its own blog in a matter of minutes without serious problem.

While I’m writing this article, I checked the CPU usage through the cPanel and it stays as the yesterday’s figure: 161%. Why haven’t it changes? How is CPU usage metered actually ?

Unfortunately, various information found on the internet have revealed that WordPress is in fact hungry of CPU. The cited reasons for this are (1) bad coding of the WordPress machine itself, (2) the presence of some pluggins, and (3) use of ‘heavy’ themes.

But should WordPress be totally blamed for this excessive CPU usage. As a webstudent, I cannot comment much. I said previously this site is quite ‘small’: small number of page hits per day, small number of visitors per day, and limited ‘forum’ activities in the form of user comments at the end of each of the article. You can see this information displayed by the Histats at the right bottom corner of the site.

Based on the tips from the internet, the number of pluggins activated on this site has been kept to minimal. They are: Akismet, Paged comments, WP-pageNavi, and WP Super Cache. The latter was recommended by most WordPress gurus as they claimed it can substantially reduces the CPU usage. It may be the case. Before I activated the SuperCache two days ago, the CPU usage recorded was 198%, and then it went down to 168% and now 161%.

But was this reduction due to the reactivation of Super Cache ? Not quite sure, because for a number of months this Super Cache has not been activated and no warning of CPU usage from the host.

Since the first time the warning was sent to Nias Online by the host, all the necessary effort to reduce the CPU usage has been tried, including the removal of links to a number of sites, deactivating most of pluggins and reactivation of the Super Cache.

So, what’s the cause of this excessive CPU usage ? Who can help ? SOS … (brk)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 1:11 PM and is filed under Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.