Runaway PHP processes on WP5.4.1

Thanks so much for your reply @corrinarusso – I have tested both of those as follows:

1. Cron enabled (this was how the site was running initially): PHP process spawning issue as detailed above.

2. Cron disabled – same as above

3. Self-pings disabled (using the Disabler plugin) – same issue

I was wondering if it was something like a self-ping – the runaway nature of the issue almost looks like something it calling itself over and over again – however the Chrome Developers console doesn’t show network activity so it’s almost like Chrome kicks it off, and then it runs away on the server even though the browser appears idle.

Where would you recommend I look next to address this?

@corrinarusso thank you – I have progress to report. My old hosting provider was seeing the issues, but was getting insistent that we move to a much more expensive plan under the theory that it would solve the problem. I knew that what we had put together shouldn’t be generating too much load, but they threatened to shut the site down if we didn’t upgrade, so it was a logical move – the VPS costs about the same as the hosting plan.

I have finally tracked down the issue, but the question is what to do about it. I tried a different browser and the problem went away, so I started to focus on Chrome instead and disabled the extensions one by one. In the end I found one extension that was causing the ridiculous server load. So the issue was never with the site.

My concern is – this extension is quite popular and just because I disable it doesn’t mean others won’t have it. The site is already proxied behind Cloudflare – is there a way to protect against this? I’m going to re-enable the extension and have a look at the logs and see if I can identify what it’s doing – I feel like this is something I need to protect against. I’m not clear at this stage if this is an attack or just a really bad piece of code.

I may have misunderstood Cloudflare’s offering – I thought it was supposed to protect sites under certain circumstances, though I must confess I’m not clear what it does/doesn’t protect against on the free plan.

Ok – I pinpointed the wrong plugin there after some further testing – I’ve found the right one. According to my access_log, the plugin in question is performing a GET on all the links on the page, which sounds a bit brutal – so if you hit the pages index, it hits all the pages, including all the links (edit, duplicate, etc.). This results in massive load on the server. The Chrome extension is definitely at fault, and even if I rate limit incoming connections, it will still duplicate pages, edit their status, and so on.

I’ll mark this as closed as I don’t think there’s any way I can mitigate against something hitting all the links on a given admin page in quick succession – I’ll just make a note to never use said plugin again.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by sparkyjf.