Is this reasonable? I don't know what happened - digg effect or whatever - but it makes me think I need a find a new host. And look into that wordpress cache plugin.

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If you are the webmaster, your account may have gotten this error for one or more of the following reasons:

• Your account has used more than its share of the cpu in the past 60 second sliding window.
• Your account has too many concurrent processes running simultanously.
• Your account has consumed too much memory.
• Your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts.

The solution would be to optimize your applications to use less CPU.
Adding appropriate indeces to your SQL tables can often help reduce CPU.
Using static .html documents instead of painful .php scripts will practically eliminate CPU usage.

All I'm running is wordpress on a subdomain - which I assume has an optimized db structure - and a static html site. All told, it's ~15 K unique visitors a month.

Was it a clip or your account has been overloading the server for now? It can mean one sighn for you: server you have your blog hosted on can't handle digg effect. You can take it or find btter provider which will be able to handle that

Have you contacted your host to find out what had happened?

I doubt it's any kind of Digg effect if you've only got ~ 15K visitors per month. That's about 500 a day, and that's not Digg-style traffic...unless you get 10 a day, 10 a day, 10 a day, then WHOOSH, 3000 a day. Even then, that's unlikely.

This really could be either your host or WordPress. I run it on a dedicated box where all the other sites are optimized quite nicely from a resource point of view, and I don't have a problem...but then again, it's a dedicated box and WP is the only third-party script I run. So I'm probably not the best judge of resource in that regard.

The one thing that may be throwing CPU resource usage out of whack may not be visitors, but bandwidth. In your particular case, you have a lot of photos, and photos can be resource-intensive in bulk. How much bandwidth does your blog use up in a month, and is it subject to spikes?

Is that a temporary suspension? That's rather common at hosts like Bluehost (or Hostmonster) and more recently Hostican. Due to how this works, a highly loaded <server> is particularly prone to suspend accounts (even if they're not the real culprit).

And look into that wordpress cache plugin.

That could prove to be a solution.

Pretty sure that I read somewhere that WP is a heavy user. Lots of queries per page or post.

If this is the first and only time this has happened it might be a fluke and maybe nothing to be upset about. Your log files should show you what was happening at the time. Your host should also be able to provide more details.

Almost all the budget shared hosting accounts have some cpu restrictions and/or mysql connection limits. That is how they offer a 100g of storage and TB of bandwidth for $10. It is the hidden throttle.

Originally Posted by ldcdc

That's rather common at hosts like Bluehost

A clue! It looks like things were a little unusual, but it's interesting that this is who I'm hosted with, and they're known for the practice.

Part was a lot of traffic to a post I wrote about using pure sql code to find out whether a particular object exists in any database on that server. At the same time, three new - to me at least - web spiders with bad manners went rampant over my site right before it was taken down. One is some experimental search engine IBM is working on, another is Facebook, and the third is called OpenWebSpider/0.6.1; all of these were making a lot of requests in rapid fire against my photo blog.

Go figure...Forrest and I getting screwed in some form or fashion by IBM within two days of each other (note to everyone here: IBM tape drives are GARBAGE). Color me sarcastically shocked.

maybe someone installed a bot on your server ?

well if all you're doing is running a standard blog with 15000 visits a month it can't be you overloading the server
maybe you have some kind of resource intensive script installed, something badly coded etc...

otherwise if that blog is an automated blog or soemthing not usual it might be using a lot of resources even if it's not visited a lot

maybe you have some plugin that runs heavy queries against the db or something like that

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

The one thing that may be throwing CPU resource usage out of whack may not be visitors, but bandwidth. In your particular case, you have a lot of photos, and photos can be resource-intensive in bulk. How much bandwidth does your blog use up in a month, and is it subject to spikes?

About 15 gigs a month, and there are minor spikes after I post something, but it's pretty well distributed over all. I think those three spiders hitting at the same time were the main problem.

I've been doing some homework into this... Apparently there are servers with specialized networking hardware for media intensive applications ... file servers on steroids. There are nic cards that accept native binary data and translate it into packets to offload the tcp/ip stack from the cpu. It doesn't seem to free up more than a few percent, but if you couple that with a few other issues, it might help explain why things were just bad enough to push me over quota.

A lot of the fancy stuff on my blog happens on the client side, instead of on the server: lighting up the categories in use on a given page, and whatnot.

They mention using mysql indexes ... I've just let wordpress do its thing and assumed it's coded well. If not having the right indexes was the problem, it should thrash the disc, not the cpu. Any thoughts on whether it's an overall resource quota, or a cpu quota?

They mention using mysql indexes ... I've just let wordpress do its thing and assumed it's coded well. If not having the right indexes was the problem, it should thrash the disc, not the cpu. Any thoughts on whether it's an overall resource quota, or a cpu quota?

The sql queries use a lot of memory and cpu for a short period of time.

Proper indexing can reduce the load but I have no clue as to what you would do with a WP database.

I would have to trust the host to be honest with me as to which was the problem. Most of them are not going to cut you off unless there really is a problem.

Forrest,

You should ask your host
a. check logs to establish cause of the problem
b. run at root: 'top' to see which files/programs are running
c. reboot server to stop zombie processes and to clear cache

It would give you the full picture of what is going on with your site


fastreplies

It happens.. this is the catch when they give you unlimited everything. Move to another host, best of luck.

Get in touch with your host, and find out exactly how much CPU you were using in relation to what they were allowed. If this happens repeatadly, look into a new host, or perhaps a VPS would be better for you.