How can I decrease my site's "CPU minutes per day" usage on its' server?

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  • MrSquid
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2005
    • 145
    • 4.0.0

    [Forum] How can I decrease my site's "CPU minutes per day" usage on its' server?

    This morning I received an email from the hosting company of the site I admin saying that our site's "CPU minutes per day" usage is ~24x average usage. Our site is a small site for local hobbyists - there's no streaming content, maybe 20ish users on at any given time, and on a busy day we might see 20-30 new posts. We do OpenX for banner ad rotation and CometChat. We're NOT using vbSEO.

    I recently took this particular site over from another admin and found that the "Session timeout" was set to 250000, so I reduced that to 1800 (30min). There was not a robots.txt file, so I added one (shown below). After doing those things our count of "online users" down from 71 to 20 registered users and from 1423 to 30 unregistered users/guests.

    The hosting company said it will take 24hrs to collect enough data to know if these steps have made a difference. How likely is it that one of those two things could have been the culprit? Any other suggestions of things to check? The site can't afford to pay to be moved to a VPS like our host is suggestion, and based on our ACTUAL usage, I can't see how it'd actually need that.

    Here's the robots.txt file I put in the site's root directory:
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /forums/announcement.php
    Disallow: /forums/calendar.php
    Disallow: /forums/cron.php
    Disallow: /forums/editpost.php
    Disallow: /forums/faq.php
    Disallow: /forums/joinrequests.php
    Disallow: /forums/login.php
    Disallow: /forums/member.php
    Disallow: /forums/misc.php
    Disallow: /forums/moderator.php
    Disallow: /forums/newreply.php
    Disallow: /forums/newthread.php
    Disallow: /forums/online.php
    Disallow: /forums/printthread.php
    Disallow: /forums/private.php
    Disallow: /forums/profile.php
    Disallow: /forums/register.php
    Disallow: /forums/search.php
    Disallow: /forums/sendmessage.php
    Disallow: /forums/showgroups.php
    Disallow: /forums/showpost.php
    Disallow: /forums/subscription.php
    Disallow: /forums/threadrate.php
    Disallow: /forums/usercp.php
  • donald1234
    Senior Member
    • Oct 2011
    • 1953
    • 4.1.x

    #2
    Hi, changing the time out doesn't alter the actual amount of users on your site. Just the way it's recorded. Most bad bots ignore robot.txt. If you want your forum to expand, it's time to move to a better (more expensive) hosting package I'm afraid.

    Comment

    • MrSquid
      Senior Member
      • Mar 2005
      • 145
      • 4.0.0

      #3
      Thanks, but that doesn't address the real question. We're talking about a small site that shouldn't be hogging the server's resources. There's obviously something funky going on crazy amount of the server's resources. It's not that we're a huge site or anything like that.

      So the real question again is....what can be some possible causes of sites hogging CPU resources on servers? I did a lot of searching but only found vbSEO as causing issues - and we're not using it.

      Comment

      • donald1234
        Senior Member
        • Oct 2011
        • 1953
        • 4.1.x

        #4
        There can be up to a hundred users on a shared server, it may be that someone else is using too much resources and the host is just guessing.


        If you want garenteed recources, you need vps, even then cpu is not garenteed.
        Last edited by donald1234; Tue 5 Jun '12, 2:44pm.

        Comment

        • John Lester
          Senior Member
          • Jul 2000
          • 412
          • 4.1.x

          #5
          Originally posted by MrSquid

          So the real question again is....what can be some possible causes of sites hogging CPU resources on servers?
          Searches. I have 2 forums on one shared hosting plan and the 'archived' forums are huge. When someone searches a particularly large thread it bogs down everything.

          If you have cpanel goto the cpanel -> file manager -> tmp -> msql_slow_queries ... or something close to that last one

          Open the slow queries and sort by date and check out the last couple of entries to get a better idea of what might be causing your issues.
          BrainTalk is a support group for friends, family, caregivers, and patients with neurological disorders and other health related diagnosis.

          BrainTalk Communities Inc
          sigpic

          Comment

          • PossumX
            Senior Member
            • Oct 2006
            • 261
            • 4.1.x

            #6
            How can I decrease my site's "CPU minutes per day" usage on its' server?

            Chat programs are notorious for killing shared hosting accounts. Kill live chat to start and then go through the settings and turn off what you do not need. I went through this with a client last year and the chat program was the main culprit, as well a few other mods.

            Did you change hosts recently? Who's your hosting with? I had major issues with Siteground on their mid tier shared platform for 2 clients who insisted on being with them (have since left that host).

            In general, it all depends on the hosting company and they often want to try and get you to upgrade or just want you gone.

            Comment

            • MrSquid
              Senior Member
              • Mar 2005
              • 145
              • 4.0.0

              #7
              John - I'm not network savvy enough to be able to interpret any sort of SQL queries. I don't know what cpanel is - but I've got phpmyadmin through my hosting company.

              PossumX - The site is hosted through Site5, and has been since day #1 (about 2 1/2 years)

              One thing I do find interesting is that nothing major has changed on our site in a LONG time. Their email said that this was discovered during an audit on the server as it was having lots of problems and they would be moving us to a VPS if this isn't resolved. When I logged into my control panel on their site, there was an announcement dated 6/1/12 saying that VPS is now available and to contact them for details.

              They also sent me a list of the top 10 IP's visiting today, and they're all from trusted & active members (some which I know personally) but have crazy high numbers of HTTP requests. (#1 @ 6,554 HTTP requests, #2 @ 4,845, #3 @ 2,782)

              Comment

              • John Lester
                Senior Member
                • Jul 2000
                • 412
                • 4.1.x

                #8
                Cpanel is your "control panel" on the host site (most places it's known as cpanel) and the mysql slow query file is a plain text file that tells you if a particular query (ie search) is taking a long time (just fyi ).

                If you do find the mysql slow query file, you can zip it and attach it to a post if you want someone to take a look at it.
                BrainTalk is a support group for friends, family, caregivers, and patients with neurological disorders and other health related diagnosis.

                BrainTalk Communities Inc
                sigpic

                Comment

                • Final Kaoss
                  Senior Member
                  • Nov 2006
                  • 581

                  #9
                  Pastebin is a much better option than zipping & attaching for text files.
                  Originally posted by John Lester
                  Cpanel is your "control panel" on the host site (most places it's known as cpanel) and the mysql slow query file is a plain text file that tells you if a particular query (ie search) is taking a long time (just fyi ).

                  If you do find the mysql slow query file, you can zip it and attach it to a post if you want someone to take a look at it.

                  Comment

                  • Ace
                    Senior Member
                    • Apr 2004
                    • 4051
                    • 4.2.X

                    #10
                    Chat programs are generally quite heavy on the load side of things. I would expect to see an impact if you were to turn that off for 24 hours.
                    My Live vB5 Site - NZEating.com
                    vBulletin Hosting | vBulletin Services - Need hosting for your vB? Need it installed? Something else? Let me take that hassle off your hands.

                    Comment

                    • MrSquid
                      Senior Member
                      • Mar 2005
                      • 145
                      • 4.0.0

                      #11
                      Thanks guys. I'm suspecting that it's the chat program (CometChat). I took all sorts of optimization steps and expect to hear back from the hosting company soon to see if those helped at all. If not, I'm going to move our chat over to CometService, taking most of that work off of our Site5 server.

                      Comment

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