I’m recently getting random spikes in load and cpu at least once in a few days, which slow down and mostly crashes the wordpress site. My question is that how can I precisely detect what causes this. I’ve tried several things like increasing wp memory limit but without knowing the cause of this, it is meaningless.
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Hi there,
Random spikes on WordPress usually come from traffic bursts (legit or bots), heavy plugins, or scheduled jobs like backups or cron. Bumping memory is one way to go but you could also check what actually is going on on the server itself as well.
First step is to check your Apache/access logs around the spike. I put together a small script to make that easier: quick_access_logs_summary. It’ll show if a specific path, plugin, or bot is hammering your site.
Also worth:
-
Run
top/htopduring a spike to see which process is heavy. -
Check
crontab -land/etc/cron.*for scheduled jobs. -
Put Cloudflare (or another CDN/proxy) in front of your site to absorb junk traffic and cache static content.
-
Delete any plugins and themes that you are not actually using: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-to-secure-wordpress-without-a-security-plugin
Once you know if it’s traffic or local jobs, you can tune accordingly.
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