Question

Droplet Running Slow (WordPress + CloudFlare)

Hi!

I set up my two websites (outliyr.com & mindbodypeak.com) under one Droplet. It sits behind CloudFlare.

Trying to figure out where the major speed problem lies. When working in WordPress, I’ll sometimes get a “Server Busy” page.

When the sites get especially slow, I’ll restart both apache and MySQL, which seems to help temporarily.

I’ve migrated outliyr several times, and I think the SQL database is cluttered.

I’ve tried disabling plugins and going to the default theme. Didn’t change much.

The ‘top’ command doesn’t show anything chewing up CPU or RAM. Although occasionally the two instances of apache2 and mysqld will spike CPU up to 50-60% and RAM to ~40%.

Any ideas on where to begin troubleshooting?

Thanks for any help!


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

alexdo
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
August 20, 2022

Hello @swimmingaquamarineurchin

Are the sites receiving moderate to high traffic during the periods that you experience slow loading times?

WordPress sites can easily become large in size due to the installation of a lot of plugins (most of them are usually not actually needed). Having a huge database will not help either, especially if it’s not indexed.

You can use sites like Gtmerix, Pingdom and Google page speed to test both sites and analyze them.

https://gtmetrix.com/

https://tools.pingdom.com/

https://pagespeed.web.dev/

These sites will give recommendations like reducing the size of your home page (in case there are a lot of images that are not size optimized and etc) reducing external requests and etc.

This will be a good starting point for making sure that the sites are optimized.

You can check the Apache error_log and track down any references if the Apache workers have been exceeded.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/site-goes-down-often-until-we-restart-apache-this-happens-mostly-with-traffic-but-without-traffic-as-well

Regards

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up