Support

June 28, 2017 at 10:47 am

We have a VPS server and have 15 EE4 sites running. Our server keeps crashing because of the following: EE is the main plugin on all of the sites.

I am seeing that a lot of WordPress faux-cron jobs are being run by your sites. By default, every time someone loads your site, the wp-cron.php file is run. Most of the time, this isn’t harmful. But if your wp-cron.php file is set to do some intense tasks, this can drive up resource usage. Thus, you should convert the wp-cron.php task into a Linux cron job. This is actually easier than you think. You simply need to have the Linux cron job utilize wget once an hour on the file via your URL. So let us say you URL is http://example.com . Then the URL need to call would be http://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron . Since you don’t want a million emails letting you know it run, you want to add 2>&1 at the end. Then we just want to call that via wget quietly. Since we only want it running once per hour, the coding for the cron job becomes:
0 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -q -O – http://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron 2>&1
Add that as a Linux cron job via the cPanel cron job tool, then add the following to your wp-config.php file:
define( ‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true );
This will ensure the tasks still run without overdoing it. This reduces the resource usage overhead. This makes the site load faster without harming the server.

3) The 503 errors are a function of the process limits being reached due to stacked requests. If the sites are optimized enough that php processes open/close quickly, that may alleviate the 503 temporary unavailable error messages.