WordPress Blogs and Runaway Plug-ins
When you are hosting a wordpress blog on a shared hosting plan, if you don’t know if you are on “shared hosting” then assume that you are, if you are paying less than $15 per month then odds are you are shared hosting. Shared hosting means that you share the same web server as hundreds or thousands of other users and this is accomplished by the web server admins making sure that no single user’s processes (apache, php..etc) exceed a certain threshold.
So if you are running a wordpress blog (as I am), and you install some plug-ins all may seem fine, but when one of your plug-ins goes astray and starts hogging memory or RAM, your hosting provider will likely have scripts in place to terminate your web server process, this is done so that your runaway process doesn’t negatively impact other users on the same web server, but has the unfortunate side effect of making your web site unavailable.
To make matters worse, even with their task killer in place, my process kept respawning and being killed over and over again which left my site perpetually unavailable for eight hours. I wish they would have just bounced my apache instance instead of killing the specific php processes that were running over, since they clearly kept respawning.
In the end, my hosting provider must have done that as my site came back up and stabilized. I still have no idea which one of my twenty plug-ins caused the issue, so I started by disabling all of them and adding a few much needed ones back in. From browsing online I heard that Google XML SiteMaps can be a big memory hog, indeed it does take up 27mb of RAM when it indexes the SiteMap.xml but it only runs for 27 seconds once per day, so that wasn’t my culprit. The other problem I hear is wp-super-cache can actually hog alot of memory, so I temporarily have it disabled.
In the meantime I have used every unix script I know (lsof, ps -auxx, ptrace) and I still am unable to find which wordpress php plug-in is causing my memory leaks, and since it only happens once a week or two, I don’t really have a good way to find out. If anyone knows how to get the exact ram utilization for a specific php plug-in, I implore you to share with me.
In the meantime, bloggers who use wordpress BEWARE:
Use as few plug-ins as you can, and remember that runaway plug-in proceses can be the cause of your downtime if you frequently have site down time or 500 errors.
-Dragon Blogger
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