In the past couple of years, as well as overseeing medium and large business WordPress development at Silicon Dales, I’ve also kept my skills sharp working on over 330+ freelance projects of varying sizes.
Often I’m contracted to consult or troubleshoot difficult situations, so I see a lot of common threads running through tasks, which allow me to offer assistance to WordPress webmasters who may be struggling with similar issues.
One thing I’ve seen cropping up a little on more complex WP sites in the past few months is sites hosted on Siteground who are – in one way or another – maxing out their CPU.
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Who am I to Talk?
I’m a WordPress developer with over 11 years of experience. I set up and work for Silicon Dales, one of only 2 UK accredited WooCommerce Agencies.
I work hard to speed up WordPress sites every day. If you want a quick and dirty test of how this can manifest, Google search “Fastest Website in the World” and you’ll most likely find me on the first page – a link back to this website. Try here.
NOTE You can see my latest ratings and reviews from hundreds of projects, in the Hire WordPress Developer pages, here.
Types of Issues when CPU Resources are Exhausted
Generally, this presents in a few ways:
- Site maxes out it’s CPU allowance from time-to-time (or all the time!); or
- Siteground contacts the website owner to say they are short of CPU time (or similar message) – or worse, they have actually run out of this resource;
- Site is generally slow, and they notice CPU is spiking;
- Other CPU related issues.
What’s the Cause of this issue?
The root cause of these issues will usually be a combination of factors, but there’s some code which is using CPU resources, which is more often than not more exposed under load – sometimes even quite light load.
This will be most exposed by “uncacheable” elements, like WooCommerce checkouts, or admin activities (adding or removing posts or etc).
Side Effects of Maxed out CPU Resources
There may be connected and related side effects, such as:
- Website is slow at busy times; or
- Website is slow on the admin side; or
- Website is slow all the time! (argh!!); or
- Other side effects of maxing out CPU, such as:
- cron tasks incomplete;
- incomplete payments;
- failing orders.
Getting This Resolved
As a consequence of working on many similar troubleshooting tasks, I’ve become deeply experienced in getting CPU related issues in Siteground and other shared hosts resolved.
