Question

100% CPU load (non-stop), out of the blue. Droplet is stuck ... what to do ...

So, I’ve got this droplet running for around 3 years. It’s been running fine, but suddenly today, it’s not responsive.

The droplet is in NY3

I can’t get to the wordpress site that’s installed, and I cannot get through on SSH. Sometimes it works, but it’s incredibly slow …

I was able to get to htop and it showed me that there’s a 100% CPU load.

When I turn off the droplet and the start it again, it works for about 1 minute, before getting back to the problem situation.

This thing was working perfectly yesterday, and nothing happened between then and now …

Any tips on how to proceed ?

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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September 3, 2022

Hi there,

It sounds like that you might be getting a spike in the traffic. What I could suggest is:

  • Check the processes that are using most of your resources by following the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-find-the-processes-that-are-consuming-the-most-server-resources

  • Check your Apache access lots to see if you are not getting any malicious traffic or a brute-force attack. You can use the following script to summarize your access logs: BASH Script to Summarize Your NGINX and Apache Access Logs

  • Do some general optimizations like: disable and delete all plugins and themes that you do not use, install a caching plugin like WP Super cache. Use a CDN like Cloudflare

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby

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