All hosting accounts on Pakish shared, business and reseller platforms have resource limits in place. These resource limits are designed to safeguard your account. In the past, other users on the server could consume all of the available resources (CPU/Processor, RAM/Memory or Disk Access) and cause a slow down for other websites hosted on the same server.
Pakish uses the CloudLinux operating system that has resource limits set by a LVE system; kernel-level technology embedded in the server to ensure all websites on the server get full access to a fair share of resources.
Reasons for 'Resource Limit is Reached' errors:
When your website is hitting one or more of its hosting account resource limits, it can result in 'Resource Limit Reached' errors or slow down the website. What error will appear depends on the resource limit the account is hitting.
The error 508 appears when entry processes hit the limit. If this limit is reached, mod_hosting limits will not be able to place Apache processes into LVE and will return error code 508. This way a very heavy site starts returning 508 errors without affecting other users on the server.
However, if the site is limited by CPU or IO - the site will start responding slower.
If the site is limited by memory or number of processes limits - the user will see 500 or 503 errors that the server cannot execute the script.
Everything you do on your website, from uploading files, installing plugins to having visitors, uses server resources.
Excessive CPU resource usage is usually caused by:
Inefficient third party add-ons (themes, plugins)
Outdated code
Misconfigurations (PHP/configuration settings)
Backend scripts or cron jobs: scripts running in the background, including automatic backups and demanding cron jobs can create significant load, which in addition to normal traffic can affect the website performance and cause the over usage;
Web crawlers or search engines indexing your website too often;
Badly written scripts: scripts and plugins that are outdated or incorrectly coded can malfunction and cause loops. Even a few concurrent requests to such scripts can push the website over its resource limits.
The following suggestions are possible solutions for optimizing your CPU resource usage. While these suggestions are intended to help reduce the amount of resources consumed by your website, they are not guaranteed to resolve resource usage issues.
As always, it is recommended that you create a backup before making any changes or adjustments to your website.
Optimize Your Scripts
If you are utilizing a CMS or script, you may simply need to perform some simple optimization steps.
Optimizing WordPress
- Protect Your WP-Admin
Attacks are commonly targeted at the WP admin which consumes high amounts of CPU.
- Eliminate High CPU Plugins
These resource-hungry plugins are CPU killers.
High CPU plugins usually include social share, statistic, chat, calendar, page builders, backup, and plugins that run ongoing scans/processes or show multiple times in your GTmetrix report.
- Find Slow Loading Plugins
If the same plugin shows up multiple times in your GTmetrix report, or it takes a long time to load in your Waterfall tab, you may want to find an alternative plugin that is more lightweight.
- Rethink Your Page Builder
Oxygen is the fastest, otherwise your page builder could be causing high CPU.
Even Elementor adds a ton of scripts to your website (which you can see in Asset CleanUp or Perfmatters) and makes the front end and admin panel run slower, requiring more resources.
- Clean Your Database
Most people are using WP Rocket (if you’re not, you should) which has an option to clean your database. Otherwise, use a plugin like WP-Optimize. Keep your database clean by running a scheduled cleanup once every 1-2 weeks.
- Upgrade To PHP 7.4
Login to your hosting account and find the area to update PHP versions.
Upgrade to the highest possible version and check your website for errors (if you see any, revert to an earlier version).
- Delete Unused Plugins + Themes
Unused themes store preconfigured settings in your WordPress database (similar to plugins). Go to Appearance > Themes then delete all the WordPress themes you’re not currently using.
- Check Your Server Response Time
It’s also a good idea to run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights to check your server response time which Google says should be >200ms.
The easiest way to fix this is to move your wp-login page (since bots usually just target the default login page). You can do this with Perfmatters or Move Login. You can also try limiting login attempts.
- Optimize Images
Images can consume lots of bandwidth,
There are 3 main ways to optimize images in GTmetrix.
- Serve scaled images – resize large images to be smaller
- Specify image dimensions – specify a width/height in the HTML
- Optimize images – losslessly compress images
Start by optimizing images that appear on multiple pages (logo, sidebar, footer images). Then run your most important pages through GTmetrix and optimize individual images on those. The first item you should work on is “serve scaled images” since this requires you to scale (resize) an image to the correct dimensions, upload the new image version to WordPress, and replace it.
- Disable Unused Plugin Functionality
If you have a robust plugin installed but you only use a few of it’s features, disable the ones you don’t use. Some common examples are Elementor plugins, JetPack, and unused Yoast features. This is especially true for plugins that run ongoing processes (eg. Broken Link Checker, Query Monitor, stats plugin, or even plugins that send you notifications in the WP admin or via email).
Additional Optimization Tips
Some additional steps you can take to avoid CPU resource usage issues include:
- Generating a flat HTML page for popular content
- Enabling caching which is available through many popular scripts
