Website shutdown because of 40% CPU load

[toxicious]

My website was hosted by a free host for 2 months without complaints, then I moved to a new paid host, and it got shutdown after some hours because it created a 40% load on their Xenon 8 core CPUs?!

Though they say they will take a look at it too see if they can correct anything that is brutally wrong in the scripts, I thought that I wanted to help too (it is my site duh).

I'm not a PHP expert, I'm learning and coding a lot though every week.
My website is very db heavy I think, it is basically a front-end UI for listing the stuff in the DB and allowing the user to interact with it.

I don't have that much stats on it, but I know that I had ~300 daily visits every day when it got shutdown, and probably a lot more outer calls to the API I wrote.

So I am not sure what caused that load since I am inexperienced with web coding. I do have a shoutbox accessible on all of the few pages, which makes a query to the db every 3 seconds to check for new messages when the site is open. But still, I've seen lots and lots of sites with shoutboxes so I doubt that is the problem.

Since the load is so damn big compared to the average user (which they say is 1-2%) I thought that maybe someone here have a clue about the problem even though I don't provide the source code of the page.

So yeah, if anyone feels like throwing out a clue idea, please do!
I really feel I have abandoned my users since the website is down

toxicious Reviewed by toxicious on 28th Jul 2012. Website shutdown because of 40% CPU load My website was hosted by a free host for 2 months without complaints, then I moved to a new paid host, and it got shutdown after some hours because it created a 40% load on their Xenon 8 core CPUs?! Though they say they will take a look at it too see if they can correct anything that is brutally wrong in the scripts, I thought that I wanted to help too (it is my site duh). I'm not a PHP expert, I'm learning and coding a lot though every week. My website is very db heavy I think, it is Rating: 5

[DJboutit]

40% cpu use is kinda high I guess this new host believe your gonna run a torrent script or rapid leech so they banned you

[futureawesome]

Shoutbox isn't even hosted on your server so it shouldn't even cause cpu usage issues.
You either had some weird loop or your not telling the whole story.

[toxicious]

I promise you that I haven't any weird things running, no rapidleech or torrent. Basically just lots of mysql queries. Everything else are by mistake/errors.

[futureawesome]

Then it doesn't seem like PHP is the culprit. It would be more of your sql optimization.

[Long]

I'd have to agree with futureawesome somewhat and say that you should optimize both PHP and SQL.

There is plenty of free tools to help you do so, just google

[toxicious]

Yeah I think mysql is the load boss. The host sent me a picture of the load meter when it was at 40%, but on that picture I also saw a tab that said mysql. Since I no longer have a running website no data is generated, but he really should have sent me that data as well too directly see if mysql was the theif.

[Buddah]

300 visits a day... that's 13 visitors an hour. There's no way MySQL could be jacking things up that high at such a low hit rate. Even if you had a massive database incorrectly indexed and a ridiculous amount of queries per page, it should never go that high.

You're tying everyone's hands behind their backs by not saying what kind of site it is, what kind queries are issued, the quantity of said queries, and what system you're using, unless it's custom.

[Robin A.]

300 visitors are too much 40% load. There should something more. I know a site in my server that getting way more than 5000 visitor p/d and the load is just as normal.
Try Caching your site as I think not only the mysql is the culprit here also non optimized php, js, image, css all can be responsible for 40% Load!

You should provide some more info about your scripts as we cannot give any dime clue on it without knowing anything about ur db query, loop thingy.

[FarSeeR]

I had such an issue before, but the hosting support team checked it theirselves and fixed it.
If your website is a wordpress site, then it can be from one of your plugins. That is what my issue was coming from.