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lots of process running on server

Posted: August 17, 2012 at 2:23 pm

Viewing 22 reply threads


Dave

August 17, 2012 at 2:23 pm

Do you know if you are running a lot of processes on the server when people are registering


Dave

August 20, 2012 at 4:37 am

Let me explain what has happened. We opened live on Friday and the hostgator server could not handle the amount of processes. The shared servers allow up to 25 process at once and then the server give an 500 error. We had 500 people go to the site and they were adding the events so quickly to the cart and everytime you add to the cart its a process on the server. We have upgraded to a level 6 VPS which gives us 100 processes. We are opening this up again tonight at 6:00pm. Any suggestions??

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Dave.


Garth

  • Support Staff

August 20, 2012 at 8:27 am

So, do you have WP Users creating events, or is it just people registering?

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Seth Shoultes. Reason: text edit


Dave

August 20, 2012 at 8:31 am

All events are created, we have a total of 45 different events.

People are registering,

  1. Add to cart 1,2,3,4 different classes depends on the user
  2. fill out form
  3. go to paypal

They do not create an account and do not logon


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

August 20, 2012 at 11:36 am

We mainly run sql queries on the database, which shouldn’t be taking up too many resources/processes. The number of processes running should be based on the overhead form WordPress, the theme you have installed, and how many plugins you are running.


Dave

August 20, 2012 at 11:53 am

I have Limited number of plugins, 20 including event espresso. Most of the plugins really don’t do anything.

askimet, admin menu editor ,AG custom admin, BAckWPup, runs on Sunday Custom login lite, Dashboard Post-it, Fast Secure Contact Form ,GTranslate ,Image Widget ,Limit Login Attempts ,Superb Slideshow WordPress Firewall-2, WP-Ban, WP-Table Reloaded, WP Hide post ,WP Super Cache,counterize

This site is for a school and there are limited spots so everyone hit at once clicking add to cart. The hostgator guys said we hit our limit of 25 processes. The process are only scene when adding to cart and going thru the registration process.

These processes are suppose to open and close quickly but I don’t know if the shared server can handle the amount of traffic. Has anyone had over 500 people signup to events in under 30 minutes.. Just to let you know there was about 5000 page loads at the time.

Dave

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Dave.
  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Dave.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

August 20, 2012 at 12:03 pm

Hi Dave,

Even if most of those plugins are not doing anything, WP still loads them into memory, checks for cron jobs, runs through the transients etc.

We have seen other clients accept thousands of registrations an hour, with no problems, when running a dedicated server. Most shared servers will not be able handle that much traffic at one time. Especially with the amount of database queries that are happening when running a registration or shopping cart system. We highly recommend using a VPS or dedicated server to handle this type of traffic.


Seth Shoultes

  • Support Staff

August 20, 2012 at 12:06 pm

I have heard that the caching plugins such as WP Super Cache take up a lot of resources. We usually offload all of our images, scripts, css files, etc to Amazon Cloudfront. That usually helps with some of the page load times better than most caching plugins.


Dave

August 20, 2012 at 12:18 pm

We have switched to a VPS level 6 on hostgator and increased the number of concurrent processes to 65.

We have one image per class and it is very small 6.60 KB.

Are you saying you don’t use any caching, do you think its better without it. Hostgator told us to put it on. I have excluded the event registration page and transaction pages.


Dave

August 20, 2012 at 12:19 pm

When we were on the shared server we were not using cache at all.


Dave

August 21, 2012 at 4:42 am

Here is an update, we opened the registration at 6:00pm using VPS Level 6. I disabled almost all plugins, we might have had around 7-9 actually running. Everyone was continuously refreshing waiting for the add to cart button to appear. As soon as the button appeared everyone clicked at once and the server cpu went to 100% and we received a server error 500 and Apache had to be restarted by Hostgator. This was 500 people. The next registration is in Dec and Hostgator recommends a level 8 for this time period. Has anyone seen anything like this?


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 21, 2012 at 2:32 pm

I don’t use WP Super Cache or W3Total Cache or any of those “big” caching plugins anymore. That’s not to say you should avoid caching altogether. I find that those kind of “all in one” caching plugins often cause more problems than they solve because they activate a bunch of things that may or may not be optimal for your hosting environment. The reason why caching plugins interfere with Event Espresso is because we aren’t creating static pages and the caching plugins may not know to update/refresh the cache when a new event is created (which just means you may need to flush it manually) but a lot of plugins are doing a lot more than just creating cached pages. As such, this is what I do for speed/caching:

QuickCache for caching — the only thing this plugin does is create cached versions of all your pages on the site to save on the database hits caused when you try to access a particular page without any caching enabled. I have not yet heard of or seen a specific conflict with Event Espresso and QuickCache and it seems to work wonders.

Better WordPress Minify — many of those all-in-one caching plugins add minifying functions, but occasionally those cause issues with javascripts you are trying to load via plugins or in your theme. BWP will minify your js and css and consolidate them into one file (each) which can speed up your page load time.

Any time on any site where you are submitting information/writing data to your database at the volume you are looking at, it’s going to cause significant drain on server resources even in an optimized environment. Sites that do thousands of requests simultaneously are either on a dedicated server (or an array of dedicated servers) or using some kind of cloud-based hosting to distribute the load across many machines. If HostGator says you need a more powerful VPS for your next event to support the traffic spike, I’d go with their recommendation.


Dave

August 21, 2012 at 3:20 pm

Thanks Chris,

This is the first public school I used this on, I have to purchase your software for another public school and there might be another after that. This first go around was kinda of a disaster. It wasn’t the software it was under estimating the amount of people signing up.

If I use quick cache to I need to exclude any pages?


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 21, 2012 at 4:15 pm

I’ve never had to mess with the settings, but if you wanted/needed to exclude anything, I’d exclude the Event Espresso pages (so the event-registration page, registration-cancelled page, transactions page and the thank-you page).


Dave

August 21, 2012 at 6:32 pm

So you never experience duplicate entries or difficulty removing an event in the cart?

  • This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by Dave.


Josh

  • Support Staff

August 21, 2012 at 8:55 pm

Hi Dave,

We do not see this in our testing. Is this something that is happening on your site right now?


Dave

August 22, 2012 at 4:32 am

No this happened when I used WP-Super Cache and I didn’t exclude the event-registration, transaction and registration-cancelled pages.

But if you tested and it doesn’t happen with quickcache I am ok with it.


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 22, 2012 at 9:45 am

I can do some testing today to double-check but no, this isn’t something I’ve ever seen. Moreover, for what QuickCache does (which integrates with built-in WordPress caching functionality), I don’t see any reason why it would cause issues. I’ll let you know if I find anything different.


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 22, 2012 at 4:38 pm

Just tested locally with QuickCache and didn’t see any issues. Of course, I’m not simulating 500 simultaneous registrations, but, as I said, QuickCache is different than a lot of the other “bigger” caching plugins.


Dave

August 22, 2012 at 5:22 pm

Great what cache expiration timeout settings are you using, did you just keep the default 3600 and did you change any of the default settings?


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 23, 2012 at 10:45 am

I followed the instructions in the plugin and didn’t touch anything! 🙂 Your mileage may vary, though, as your site has a lot more heavier traffic than anything I’m using it on.


Chris Reynolds

  • Support Staff

August 23, 2012 at 10:46 am

3600 / 60 == 60 minutes, so that would flush the cache once an hour. Depending on how frequently you post updates, new events, etc, you may or may not want to adjust that to be longer between expiration times (which would lessen the server load when it’s doing the flushing, which could be handy during peak times).


Dave

August 23, 2012 at 10:47 am

Thanks again for all your help, I will try it out.

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