Urgent: High CPU usage and extremely slow admin

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Hello,

All plugins that can be safely disabled are now turned off. The remaining active plugins are required for the basic functionality of the shop, so disabling them would break the website.

Currently, the CPU usage generated by this website is very low, which you can see in the server monitoring.

ps -eo pcpu,args | grep “pool shanidoo.cz” | grep -v grep | awk ‘{sum+=$1} END {print “Total CPU:”, sum”%”}’
Total CPU: 96.9%

I am sharing the current CPU usage of the websites on our server:

141.5% CPU skrinshop.cz (Woodmart)
71.0% CPU shanidoo.cz (Woodmart)
42.5% CPU abglassbohemia.com (Woodmart)
25.8% CPU xxx.sk
16.9% CPU xxx.cz: 16.9% CPU

For testing purposes, the Shanidoo website is currently in maintenance mode and all third-party plugins have been disabled, so the CPU load you see is purely from the theme and essential WordPress functionality.

We are experiencing unexplained load spikes. This morning, the server load average was consistently over 50.

Although the load is currently around 3, it still indicates server stress. Looking at the current CPU usage, you can see three major contributors, all of which are websites running the Woodmart theme.

It seems this issue may not be isolated to our setup, as other users have reported similar problems. See this discussion on Reddit: WordPress 6.9 causing permanent 100% CPU usage https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1pd35y4/wordpress_69_is_causing_permanent_100_cpu_usage/

Please advise on possible optimizations or fixes to reduce the server load while keeping the theme active.

Thank you for your support.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by kotromar.

Hello,

Thank you for your analysis and recommendations.

Currently, we are managing four separate servers hosting client websites. On one server, we intentionally do not host any Woodmart sites – server is calm. Additionally, we have moved one large Woodmart website to a dedicated server – we have both Cloudflare and WP Rocket enabled. Despite this, we experienced high load average this morning — over 30 on the server.

For example, on skrinshop.cz, both Cloudflare and WP Rocket are active, and the server also has DoS protection enabled. As you can see from the current access log snippet below, the site was not overloaded with requests:

On the server ago08.vas-server.cz, we have recorded a high CPU load over the last 15 minutes – specifically 35.84326171875.
Here is the list of IPs in the current hour and the number of website visits:

2a01:28:ca:112::1:137 186
193.84.162.120 139
104.22.24.182 71
72.145.144.234 56
104.22.1.205 48
104.23.245.3 45
2a03:2880:f814:37:: 44
172.69.71.156 44
172.68.70.250 40
172.71.23.39 40
2a00:11b1:1121:2759:c644:4a4a:d28c:99db 38
172.71.30.226 36
172.71.15.128 30
108.162.237.187 22
172.68.213.240 15
2a03:2880:f814:10:: 14
2a03:2880:f814:5:: 14
2a03:2880:f814:c:: 13
74.7.227.54 13
2a03:2880:f814:27:: 13

This indicates that the server load was not caused by excessive traffic or DoS attacks.

Given this, we still see high CPU usage and load spikes associated with Woodmart sites, despite caching and Cloudflare being active.

Hello Artem,

I understand that it is difficult to pinpoint the issue. However, this is already the several time we are dealing with a completely overloaded server, where it is impossible to load any of the websites. The websites causing the highest load are always those running the WoodMart theme.

I am sharing a CPU monitoring screenshot from the last three days, showing what happened on the server this morning. The server was overloaded up to 778%, even though the IP addresses generating this load visited the site only around 20 times within an hour.

Please advise on how we can further investigate or resolve this performance issue, as it clearly impacts server stability.