High Physical memory usage even at no traffic

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Hello,

There's a weird issue I am facing. A site was recently restored from another server to current server. DNS isn't even propagated and there's no traffic at all on site.

Server is running litespeed

top -u user

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND 
3331760 user  20   0  343952  55416   4780 S  24.5  0.1   0:00.74 lsphp  
3260988 user  20   0  454356  92428   6280 S   7.3  0.1   0:41.78 lsphp  
3314034 user  20   0  298568  14812   9816 S   0.0  0.0   0:00.04 lsphp  
3328239 user  20   0       0      0      0 Z   0.0  0.0   0:00.01 cpaneld +
3328667 user  20   0       0      0      0 Z   0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpaneld +

Where's on each page load (admin or frontpage) it's consuming around 2.3g out of 2.5G physical memory allocated to it.

I've also use P3 plugin for WordPress which shows around 80mb usage and also confirmed similar digit using another plugin.

Any guess what might be causing such usage?

 

[rpvw]

Have you tried to disable the WP xmlrpc to see if the memory usage drops to normal ?

You could use a code in your htaccess file something like

# Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests
<Files xmlrpc.php>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from 123.123.123.123
</Files>

 

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Yes, I've confirmed this is not the case.

Also, it seems like memory usage is now not even dropping below 2.3G even with almost no traffic.

 

[rpvw]

Disable the plugins one by one to see if any of them are responsible.

You may need to considered that the site might have been compromised on the other server, and you have restored malware onto this server.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

The following thread is also worth reviewing for an overview of how memory usage works on Linux:

Memory usage apparently higher than expected

Thank you.

 

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Hello,

The following thread is also worth reviewing for an overview of how memory usage works on Linux:

Memory usage apparently higher than expected

Thank you.

Thanks, I am aware of linux system as itself but can you confirm if the same if applicable on individual accounts? I've never seen or experienced this before.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Thanks, I am aware of linux system as itself but can you confirm if the same if applicable on individual accounts? I've never seen or experienced this before.

Can you provide more information about the overall memory usage on the system? For instance, what's the output from the "free -m" command when this happens?

Thank you.

 

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Here you go

# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          64232        6124        1909        4028       56198       53260
Swap:             0           0           0

I'm not quite sure what kind of other information so if you can let me know, I can provide it.

Can you provide more information about the overall memory usage on the system? For instance, what's the output from the "free -m" command when this happens?

Thank you.

 

[WebHosting-UK]

Very useful thread, i've also had several clients with issues with their xmlrpc.php file using a lot of memory.

The htaccess code will be very handy for future issues, thanks!

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello @Chirag Aggarwal,

The overall memory usage on the system looks okay. That said, you may still want to determine what's leading to the increased memory usage from that account. The earlier advice from @rpvw is solid:

Disable the plugins one by one to see if any of them are responsible.

You may need to considered that the site might have been compromised on the other server, and you have restored malware onto this server.

Additionally, if disabling the plugins one by one doesn't help to narrow down the cause of the issue, take a look at the Apache domain access logs (/usr/local/apache/domlogs/) for the domain name to see if you can get a better idea of the specific URLs requested when the memory usage increases.

Thank you.