Troubleshooting procwatch with top command to see processes: now what?

wordpress
#1

Hi everyone,

Tried searching for this but didn’t find my exact question.

I’m about to hire a freelancer on UpWork to optimize my WordPress site because it has slow load time and bad performance scores on PageSpeed, gtmetrix, pingdom, etc. The freelancer said one of the issues is slow server response time, so I opened a support ticket asking about this. Support told me that I’m reaching the memory limit and referred me to this link: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/216540488-Why-.

I used the -top command to see the processes running, but I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at or how to reduce memory. Are these processes from my theme? Plugins? What do I do to reduce memory? Do I need to upgrade to a VPS instead of a shared server?

The website is currently under construction and hasn’t been launched to my email list yet, so there aren’t any users on the site yet that I know of.

Here is a screenshot of my SSH: http://tinypic.com/r/fcrwo0/9.

Any help would be immensely appreciated. :grinning:

#2

Are you on dedicated server ?

#3

I have the happy hosting plan / shared hosting

#4

I think it’s hard to expect anything from a shared hosting.
Instead of paying anyone to try to optimize my website on shared plan that will never be good, better pay for a VPS at least I think.
I am on dedicated and even very neat wordpress websites are not so fast, so I would not waste my time on shared. At least do not expect too much.

#5

Gotcha. I just manually enabled gzip compression and that put the scores way up from what they were in a matter of seconds (at least on Google PageSpeed). Also enabled cloudflare, but they said it would take a few hours for that to take effect. But I understand what you are saying about the shared hosting.

#7

DreamHost PS tries to set the range of waiting apaches to use the available RAM so as to give you the best performance. Where apache settles in is dependent on your site’s traffic. If you move the slider down it will lower the range of waiting apaches. Have you tried lowering the slider? Does your website still function well?
At any given moment many of the apache processes might be waiting for incoming connections. But, there is overhead to dropping and restarting the processes, so you don’t want to always have to spawn a new one for each new request.
As John points out if you can move the slider all the way down and your site still works fine, then you didn’t need the extra RAM and apaches. If you notice a performance hit, then your site actually needs those resources to perform well.

UC Browser SHAREit

#8

I think there was a bug in my theme from WPZOOM so they went in with an admin account and fixed it. I think everything is working fine now. Thanks!

#10

Common remedies for WP performance issues include reducing the number of plugins, restarting plugins one by one to see which one(s) are abusive, checking with authors who may have poorly written loops and queries, deactivating test plugins, and updating or replacing themes.

Please check my profile for this forum and follow the threads where I documented performance concerns and went through a number of remedies. I believe that info will be very educational for anyone attempting to optimize WordPress.

In my threads here I also describe my migration of some sites to DreamCompute. I’m in the process of moving anything that I actually care about from shared space to DC servers. That’s the real answer to performance issues.

Also take a look at the Hummingbird plugin from WPMU DEV. It facilitates compression, combining scripts, caching, and other mechanisms to improve performance. Their Smush plugin also helps to reduce image size. They also provide a free CDN which may be comparable to the free CloudFlare offered by DH. ( If you decide to become a subscribing member with WPMU DEV, please let me know as we get some credit for referrals. )

Another bit of “side” advice - if you’re contracting with someone for optimization, you shouldn’t need to do detailed inquiries like this yourself. If your contractor doesn’t know how to diagnose your WP performance issues then that is not the right person.

HTH

#11

Well, I faced the same problem, still no solution.

#12

I ended up not hiring any consultants and did the work myself. The resource thing was a bug as confirmed by WPZOOM. Thank you everyone for the help and suggestions!

@Starbuck-- I have Smush installed and previously had Hummingbird installed (tried a bunch of optimization plugins over the past few weeks). I’ll be sure to let you know if I become a subscribing member with WPMU DEV.

I also had two “A” scores in gtmetrix, but now those scores are now down… not sure why.

But I’ve since stopped obsessing over optimization scores since Pingdom gives an okay load time and the site appears to function okay (since moved to thefilmfund.co).

#13

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