High physical memory usage in CPanel

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jason
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I have a limit of 2 GB of Physical Memory and am usually running at near 100% with few visitors and a couple small websites. I am looking at to add a third website, but am concerned about the already high memory usage. Is this going to be a problem? What can I do with my current setup to bring the usage down? I have less than 10 plugins running on a custom theme in Wordpress for each website currently, so I was not expecting a problem at this point. 

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anonymous
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Hi Jason! High physical memory usage can be caused by a wide variety of things, so I'll try to provide some suggestions to help you narrow it down and take it from there. 

Try using a site like GTMetrix to scan your webpages. This can point you towards some sources of possible trouble with optimization. With WordPress sites, for example, admin-ajax can eat up a ton of memory if a few plugins don't work well together, and you may want to use something like Heartbeat Control to investigate. 

Check your site visitors. You want to determine if you're getting overwhelmed, in which case you would optimize and upgrade (for legitimate visitors), or work to prevent DDOS attacks (if they're mostly bots). 

You can use a combination of GTMetrix and cPanel statistics to see if any large images, videos, or files are slowing your site down. I've seen a single, huge image file used as a thumbnail slow an otherwise great site down to an almost unworkable speed once traffic picked up. 

Lastly, I'd take your site (or a test copy of it made with Softaculous), deactivate all of the plugins, and then try different combinations of active/inactive to see if there's a potential conflict between some of them. While a bit tedious, it can help narrow things down if all else fails. Hope that helps!

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jason

Looks like going through some of those worked. Thanks!

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jason

physical memory usage graph showing high load averages

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anonymous
  • Answer
  • Answered

Hi Jason! High physical memory usage can be caused by a wide variety of things, so I'll try to provide some suggestions to help you narrow it down and take it from there. 

Try using a site like GTMetrix to scan your webpages. This can point you towards some sources of possible trouble with optimization. With WordPress sites, for example, admin-ajax can eat up a ton of memory if a few plugins don't work well together, and you may want to use something like Heartbeat Control to investigate. 

Check your site visitors. You want to determine if you're getting overwhelmed, in which case you would optimize and upgrade (for legitimate visitors), or work to prevent DDOS attacks (if they're mostly bots). 

You can use a combination of GTMetrix and cPanel statistics to see if any large images, videos, or files are slowing your site down. I've seen a single, huge image file used as a thumbnail slow an otherwise great site down to an almost unworkable speed once traffic picked up. 

Lastly, I'd take your site (or a test copy of it made with Softaculous), deactivate all of the plugins, and then try different combinations of active/inactive to see if there's a potential conflict between some of them. While a bit tedious, it can help narrow things down if all else fails. Hope that helps!