Question
Droplet Running Slow (WordPress + CloudFlare)
- Posted on August 20, 2022
- DigitalOcean DropletsServer OptimizationWordPress
Asked by SwimmingAquamarineUrchin
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!
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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