Hundreds of Excessive Resource Usage emails from lfd despite setting low memory

[Colm Troy]

Hi,

I'm getting hundreds of these daily

Time: Tue Jun 27 04:40:27 2017 -0400
Account: xxx
Resource: Virtual Memory Size
Exceeded: 508 > 500 (MB)
Executable: /opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/usr/bin/php-cgi
Command Line: /opt/cpanel/ea-php56/root/usr/bin/php-cgi /home/myaccount/public_html/factory/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
PID: 4401 (Parent PID:4365)
Killed: No

So I understand I can disable these emails. But I'd rather understand the root cause and try and reduce memory usage.

I've already taken the following steps:

1.) I've set the PHP.ini memory limit to be 128M
2.) I've tweaked the Apache global config Max Request Workers to 60

Server Info
Knownhost VPS - 2.5GB RAM
Apache 2.4 - MPM Prefork
PHP 5.6 suPHP handler

I should also note that I recently upgraded from an older version of Centos/WHM to the latest version of WHM/Centos and EA4 - and I never had these kinds of issues prior to the upgrade.

Can anyone advise on:

1.) Why I'm getting scripts consuming greater than 500mb of memory when the memory limit is set at 128M?
2.) Are there any tips for reducing my memory footprint for EA4 that I should implement? My machine mainly consists of WordPress installs. I've experimented with PHP-FPM but I had to switch back to suPHP as I was experiencing some bugs with Cpanels fpm implementation not picking up user.ini values and for the brief time I had switched to FPM I didn't see a significant change in RAM usage. I also tried mod_ruid but I heavily rely on mod_security and I was seeing tons of permissions errors when using mod_ruid with mod_security - argh!

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[Infopro]

1.) Why I'm getting scripts consuming greater than 500mb of memory when the memory limit is set at 128M?

That particular script, may be under an attack of some sort, someone trying to brute force login.
This thread may be of some use:
wp-admin/admin-ajax.php causing Suspicious process running - ConfigServer Community Forum

Exceeded: 508 > 500 (MB)

This 500MB is a setting in CSF, different than memory limits.

2.) Are there any tips for reducing my memory footprint for EA4 that I should implement?

Make sure all your wordpress installs are always up to date, including any addons they may use.

 

[Colm Troy]

This 500MB is a setting in CSF, different than memory limits.

Can you explain that a bit more Infopro? If a script is set to only use 128M of RAM, surely it technically shouldn't be possible for it to use 500M?