[wp-hackers] APC-Nginx-Apache problems / memory problems on VPS

Brian Layman wp-hackers at thecodecave.com
Sun Aug 28 21:21:31 UTC 2011


On 8/28/2011 9:45 AM, Ian Douglas wrote:
> I'm beginning to think there is some kind of limitation in VPS environments.
Hey Ian,

I'm coming in late to the thread, so some of this may have been 
mentioned before. By themselves, there's not an issue with VPS servers 
and hosting WordPress.  However, being virtual, VPS servers can do some 
things that you won't likely see in physical environment.  For example 
VPSs can be very defensive about the resource limits.  They want all 
VPSs on that machine to run well.  To help ensure that, they can do 
things like going out and shutting down services that are taking up 
resources.  (It's amazing how much halting apache can reduce the load on 
a webserver. ) So just be aware of this if you are nearing the  limits 
of your VPS. If you are seeing services restarted constantly or just 
disappearing, this could be the cause. If you are not exceeding the 
limits of your purchased server, your system should run fine.

Did any one suggest using something like this to find the plugin that 
uses a get_settings call?

find /home/bikyaweb/public_html/wp-content/ -name "*.php" -type f|xargs 
grep get_settings

That will help eliminate all of the errors being written to the log.  
Really you want to eliminate every write action you can from when a page 
is being viewed.
So look at the plugins that are related to page loads.  Tracking plugins 
are notorious for this because they write information to your database. 
People sometimes load many different metrics plugins and then are 
surprised that their site slows down as it is writing the same 
information out to the database a half dozen times in addition to what 
is already recorded in the Apache log.  Also plugins that cause searches 
for information upon page load can cause issues. That's why YARP was 
mentioned by someone else as a possible issue.  With a large site, 
there's a lot of work to find any and all posts related to the one being 
displayed.

Based upon their names alone and not looking at any plugin's code, I'd 
look into these:

	social-metrics
	top-contributors
	wordpress-popular-posts
	yet-another-related-posts-plugin

And see if disabling one/all has any affect on your site's performance.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents worth of advice.

-- 
Brian Layman



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