Unexpected admin-ajax.php requests causing CPU spikes even after plugin cleanup

  • anna wilson

    (@annadarcy1)


    2 weeks, 1 day ago

    I’ve been chasing a performance issue on one of my WordPress sites and I’m starting to run out of ideas.

    The site isn’t huge and traffic has been pretty consistent, but every now and then the server usage jumps for a short period. After digging through logs, I noticed a lot of requests going through admin-ajax.php.

    What confuses me is that I originally suspected a plugin, so I removed a few that were making frequent AJAX calls. I was expecting the issue to improve, but the pattern is still there.

    I’ve spent some time checking logs and trying to narrow things down, but so far I haven’t been able to identify what’s actually triggering these requests. They don’t look obviously malicious, and the spikes seem somewhat random.

    Before I start making bigger changes to the setup, I was wondering if anyone has dealt with something similar. Is there a particular debugging method or tool that helped you trace the source of persistent admin-ajax.php activity?

    Just trying to understand whether I’m overlooking something common here.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Moderator threadi

    (@threadi)

    2 weeks, 1 day ago

    The admin-ajax.php file is used by both the backend and the frontend. However, it can also be called directly.

    My recommendation would be to first check whether any requests are being sent to this file from the frontend, and if so, which ones. You can easily check this in your browser’s developer tools. If there are already a lot of them, see which component of your project is responsible for them.

    If the developer tools don’t provide any clear information, check the access log in your hosting account to see which requests are being sent to this file. You may also see the source of the request in the form of a referrer.

    If this analysis doesn’t yield any results, you can also try deactivating some plugins to see if that improves the situation.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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