Troubleshooting high resource usage in cPanel

If you’re hitting the Cloud Linux resource limits imposed on your cPanel web hosting service, it might be causing some slowdowns or even error pages on your website.

Before you bite the bullet to upgrade your service for more resources, you should probably investigate the cause better to see if it’s not something you can fix immediately.

Timing

Check within cPanel > Resource Usage to see if it lines up at a particular time it may be linked to something happening. This could include an ad campaign you may have put out (meaning more traffic), a change you made at a certain time (did you install a plugin which has gone rogue?), or it could be a scheduled cron job causing you issues.

Caching

One big improvement that can be made to most websites, Specially WordPress ones is installation of the Litespeed Cache plugin. Offering performance boosts over other account based caching plugins this will load static files into memory from the Web Server itself leaving resources on your account clear and serving those cached pages to optimize delivery to visitors.

Further optimizations can be made via the plugin to cache some pages not others as needed to support eCommerce setups, It also gives control of purging the cache as needed from the server.

You can review our guide here on what this plugin is, installing and enabling it and how some of the basic functions are accessed.

Too many visitors?

Is it perhaps too many visitors? This could be a good thing and indicate a need to upgrade, so have a look at your web statistics to see if it’s legitimate traffic.

You may find it’s nasty malicious traffic including bots, big indicators for this include significant traffic from foreign locations such as China, Russia, and the Middle East. If you see a lot of this, perhaps try blocking their IP Addresses via these steps.

Optimise your website

Often the cause can be a poorly optimised website which is using more resources than it really should. Perhaps try these suggestions:

• Have your developer check the code to see if it could use a cleanup.
• Are you running unnecessary plugins which could be turned off?
• Run a Repair+Optimize on your database through phpMyAdmin to clear up any overheads.