High CPU Usage, Slow WHM Login, Where to Look

[701Hosting]

After updating to WHM 98 one of our web servers seems to have slowed. It could be possible that I was slow prior and we didn't login enough to notice. One thing that we are noticing is that when we log into WHM sometimes it can take 30sec - 1minute. That didn't happen before. Which log files could we look at to diagnose this?

We've recently updated EasyApache to include PHP 7.4 and switched from BIND to PowerDNS. I wouldn't think either of these changes would effect performance. It could be possible that our MySQL service is slow as there are about 30 websites hosted on a single server, all are Wordpress. Any help is appreciated.

 

[cPRex]

Hey there! For issues with the WHM interface, you'd want to check the cPanel error log file at /usr/local/cpanel/logs/error_log. If there are any failed connections or timeouts, I would expect them to show up there.

I also would not think that those changes would contribute to that type of slowness. If you wanted to check MySQL, I always recommend starting with the "mysqladmin proc status" command, as that shows what queries MySQL is handling in real-time, and will also tell you if there are any slow queries happening.

 

[701Hosting]

When I log into WHM this is what the error_log shows:

[2021-08-27 10:34:04 -0500] info [whostmgrd] Successfully verified signature for cpanel (key types: release).
[2021-08-27 10:34:21 -0500] info [queueprocd] Starting yum execution “--assumeyes --color=never --config /etc/yum.conf list installed kernelcare”.
[2021-08-27 10:34:23 -0500] info [queueprocd] Completed yum execution “--assumeyes --color=never --config /etc/yum.conf list installed kernelcare”: in 2.011 second(s).

Notice that it takes about 20 seconds to login. Is that normal?

 

[cPRex]

I don't believe the bottom two entries would be related to the server log in, as that is a yum process.

It's definitely not normal for that access to take 20 seconds. Do you have a different network you could try, such as tethering to a cell phone, to see if that makes a difference?

 

[701Hosting]

It's oddly sporadic. Somtimes when I click on the WHM logo in the top left corner the page takes 20sec to initiate the connection. Other times it's almost instant. Could be the network. Only seems like the main (1st) login page is slow. Other pages load instantly. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Port 2087 is behind a firewall so will have to enable for cell phone and try it. Thanks.

 

[cPRex]

Yeah, I'd try the alternate network and see if that's it. If not, feel free to submit a ticket to our team and we can check this out.

 

[701Hosting]

This is how my MySQL stats look.

Uptime: 165384 Threads: 19 Questions: 7176149 Slow queries: 7 Opens: 22407 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 2000 Queries per second avg: 43.390

Does that load seem high?

 

[cPRex]

None of that seems high to me at all. It's possible it's not directly related to MySQL so investigating with commands like "top -c" might show more information about what data the server is processing and point you in the right direction.

 

[701Hosting]

With top-c I see some websites that run php-fpm taking up 30-40% cpu usage when the site is visited. That doesn't seem right.

 

[701Hosting]

I'm currently using CGI for the PHP-Handler. Wondering if I should switch to suPHP or something.

 

[cPRex]

It would depend on how many CPU cores your system has too. If you have a multi-core system, that process is only taking 30-40% of one core, not the entire CPU.

 

[701Hosting]

I have about 30 websites on a 2 Core 4GB memory server cloud server hosted by Vultr. I'll keep digging and see if I can find out whats causing the bottle neck. I appreciate your quick advise and help.

 

[cPRex]

Sure thing! We have some great guides in this support article here that might help in this case:

How to diagnose high server loads

What is considered high memory, high CPU, or high I/O? You will want first to determine it is related to memory, CPU, or I/O; you can do this with the sar command. Before you understand the sar o...

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