Summary: I hate it when I waste my time doing the same tasks over and over again. That’s why we created Nelio Content, so neither you or I get stuck with boring stuff! Check it out!A few days ago we received an email from our hosting provider (SiteGround) letting us know that our site had already “90% of the allowed monthly usage of CPU” and that, once we exceeded 100%, the “webservice would be limited” and we migh have “trouble accessing it.” Quite frightening, right? It definitely was a totally undesirable situation that we had to fix as soon as possible. But… where to start?Today we wanted to share with you our experience facing a fairly common problem in websites, explaining what we did to identify the culprit and how we solved the issue. This way, if you face a similar problem, you’ll have some ideas on how to get started…Reasons why you can have high CPU usageWordPress is a content management system written in PHP. This means that the content it serves is generated dynamically by a set of PHP scripts: every time a visitor arrives at your website, WordPress processes the request (which is something like “please send me your home page”) and generates a response (in this case, it sends the home page). Clearly, responding to a request implies a certain use of server resources: one has to look at the request itself, determine what the visitor wants to access, fetch it from the database, generate the HTML response, and so on.One of the reasons why a cache system accelerates the loading time of your website should be quite obvious now: it basically saves this processing time. When a specific request arrives for the first time (“send me your home page”), WordPress kicks off and generates the response. If a cache is in place, it stores said response before it’s actually sent to the visitor. This way, future requests to that same resource (in our example, a home page) no longer require WordPress to process anything; the cache can send back the copy it saved before, thus saving time and resources.With this performance in mind, it is not difficult to imagine what are the reasons why we can see high CPU usage on our server:You get too many requests. If a lot of users come to your website at the sime time, or you receive many illegitimate requests (someone’s probably attacking your server), WordPress will have to process all those requests and, therefore, the use of server resources will increase.Requests are slow to resolve. If you have a lot of plugins installed or some of your plugins is inefficient for whatever reason, all the requests you get will take longer than needed, because WordPress will run a lot of inefficient code... You are listening to the topic about "Finding the Culprit of High CPU Usage in our WordPress Server", if you want to read the full article, please visit https://geniuswp.com or the link in the description.
