100% cpu usage with wordpress theme customizer suPHP

i am running the single core 512MB DO droplet and Cent OS 6

i have configured php to use mod_suphp for security reasons. i will be running multiple sites off this box at some point, i want to isolate them all from eachother. the suphp setup went perfectly, i was able to install wordpress and set up the databases, ftp etc.

the issue i am having is that certain actions spike the php-cgi process up to 100% and eventually timeout. the wordpress customizer hangs on save while accessing the admin-ajax.php file.

one of the themes i was using (the X theme) when trying to upload a json file ended up hanging and timing out on line 30 of wp-includes/compat.php

on cpanel servers, i used suphp without any issue, and the same actions and themes work fine. the only difference i notice is that the php process on cpanel machines is “php” whereas mine is “php-cgi”. i have no idea if this is part of the issue, but any help at identifying why and how only certain wordpress scripts are overloading the cpu would be helpful.

an important note is that the site is not under any traffic when this happens, as it is only in development. also there is just over 50% of the RAM used while the CPU is spiking so i am not running out of memory