18 sites on a network is the exact same as 18 separate WP installs, when it comes to CPU.
WP Total Cache … You mean W3 total cache? You may not have set it up properly for your server. It works best if you have some PHP accellerators on, as well as memcacheD or something along those ends.
Is the 2000 page views total for all 18 sites? Have you checked your logs to see if you’re getting hammered by a bot or a log in brute force? Got a firewall up?
Hi Mika,
Sorry, yes I meant W3 Total Cache. I’m pretty sure it’s all set up correctly…
PHP accelerator is on as well as mpm prefork.
We’ve just switched it to dso and still same thing there.
2000 pages is across all sites (aggregated)
We have spotted MSN Bots hammering the site tonight so now working on changing the crawl rate with Bing.
It seems to be on every page refresh that the CPU% shoots up between about 30%-60% at the moment.
My host has also removed PDO tonight as he thought that may be conflicting as it seems that there are several processes just being kept open and these are the ones that remain high. Also with php <defunct> processes (which is why we tried switching to dso.
17418 (Trace) (Kill) townvoic 0 54.5 2.3 /usr/bin/php /home/townvoic/public_html/index.php
It seems to be the index.php which is causing the problems, but just can’t figure out anything else to improve it 🙁
My host doesn’t think that putting up a Firewall would be a good idea…
We’re now pretty sure the issue is down to bots. Just counted 35 msn bots hitting us!
Dispite having bing crawl rate set pretty low and just setting the robots.txt to:
User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 120
They keep on coming. Fingers crossed it is just this causing the problem, as last resort will be to just block them all via .htaccess!
Your host doesn’t think a firewall is a good idea?
I work for a webhost, and I think they’re shortsighted.
I mean things like this: http://configserver.com/cp/csf.html
