High CPU Load, so ISP shut down calendar plugin…..

[Dennis Freeze]

Howdy. My client at KOZT.com just told me that their ISP shut down the Events Calendar plugins because of excessive CPU usage. I’m trying to get more specific info from the ISP about what happened, since we are dead in the water right now.

We had the problem with runaway transients and multi-gigabyte options table months ago, and that is definitely not the case here. All tables in the database look to be within normal bounds for number of records and sizes….

Have you had any similar reports? Is there anything in particular I can do to figure out where the problem is? Possibly use Query Monitor to watch it? Are there any event logs written by your plugin we can check?

At the moment, I can access the site and the database, but the calendar plugins are turned off. We’re using Events Calendar, Events Calendar Pro, Community Events, Category Colors, Advanced Post Manager.

Thanks for any help! The calendar is a big part of their Web presence, so my client is antsy….

Regards,
Dennis

[George]

I’m sorry to hear about this Dennis!

We don’t have similar reports of this exact sort of situation, but from time to time there are indeed performance issues that can arise with our plugins.

I am going to forward this along to some developers on our team for further insight, and for some investigation, but in the meantime I am curious if you can provide some more details here:

1. What versions of all Modern Tribe software were you running, to the best of your knowledge/memory?

2. Did you have any custom coding on your site whatsoever, that worked with or modified The Events Calendar in any way?

3. ⚠️ Most importantly: How many events were on the site with performance issues? Again, just to the best of your knowledge, and just a rough estimate. Were you having hundreds of events per month, thousands? Dozens per day every day? Or was it a few events per week at most or something?

Next, were the events only filled up one or two months in advance? Or was a whole year’s worth of events in place, or many months ahead of all the upcoming events?

Thank you for any information you can provide here.

Sincerely,
George

[George]

Hey Dennis, I forgot something:

4. Who is your hosting provider? The web host who shut this down—if you can share a URL to their site that’d be stellar.

Cheers,
George

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

Hosting provider is Mendocino Community Network, http://www.mcn.org.

According to the client, there are 975 events with listings out to Jan 2017. During the summer months, they usually list 15-20 events per day on the weekends. Their calendar covers the county plus music events all over Northern California, and it’s a prime tourist location.

Advanced Post Manager, 4.1
The Events Calendar, 4.0.7
The Events Calendar PRO, 4.0.7
The Events Calendar Category Colors, 4.4.5
The EVents Calendar: Community Events, 4.0.6

There’s no real custom coding interacting with the calendar, just using shortcodes in the frontend, and the backend administration interface from you guys. It is a custom theme (I wrote it), but it has minimal interaction with the calendar — just using shortcodes.

If you want, I can export the relevant tables from the database and send them to you. I can also provide a login on the site if it comes to that.

I’m still waiting to hear from the ISP. I told them I want to turn the plugins back on later in the evening when traffic is low, and use Query Monitor to see if anything is out of whack. What else should I try out? I’ll also turn on the WordPress debug.log and see if anything gets caught in there….

Thanks,
Dennis

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

Just after I hit send on previous message, I got a reply from the ISP. See if this helps….

——————————————————

Right, high CPU usage due to what appears to be run away processes.

As part of the testing we isolated the KOZT website to its own Virtual Apache server. Just to rule out any potential issues from other websites causing loads that may have triggered strange behavior with the KOZT website. This did not stabilize the website and that’s when we were able to determine it was the calendar plugin causing the high CPU loads, MySQL queries and overall site instability.

Scenarios: Involving only the calendar plugin and add ons.

1: Calendar Plugin is active and the add ons disabled. The Calendar will eventually start consuming CPU resources by opening php-cgi connections over and over in addition to MySQL database connections until the connection limit per MySQL user of 200 is reached, forcing the site offline.

2: Calendar Plugin is active along with the calendar add ons. The Calendar will start consuming CPU resources almost immediately. Again by opening php-cgi connections over and over while querying the MySQL database until the connection limit on the MySQL server is reached, forcing the site offline.

As it stands now, the website is isolated from the rest of our web cluster.

[George]

This reply is private.

[Dennis Freeze]

George,

I sent a dump of the EM_* tables from the database. If you’d rather have the entire database, I can put it on box.com and send you a link.

Regards,
Dennis

[George]

Thank you Dennis!

1. Can you clarify what you mean by “em_” tables?

2. You posted some version numbers in the “system information” box, which is appreciated, but can you send over your entire, un-edited “system information” as per the instructions in this page? → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

3. If you can send over the whole database, that would indeed be very handy.

Thank you so much your patience here!

Sincerely,
George

PS
For links to the database dump, or for the system information—anything that could have “sensitive” information in it from your site, for example—feel free to use the “Private Reply” option here so that only the support team and you can see the content of those messages.

[Dennis Freeze]

I emailed the complete database to you.

[George]

Thank you! Stay tuned for more follow-ups. 🙂

[Dennis Freeze]

This reply is private.

[George]

Hey there,

I’ve responded over email and will keep the conversation going there.

I will close this thread—check out my most recent reply over email and we can continue the conversation.

Cheers,
George

[Geoff]

Hey there,

Just want to drop a quick note in here to let you know that The Events Calendar 4.2.1 is about to release any moment and it will include a patch for this issue. Please update and let us know if you continue to hit any trouble.

Thanks so much for your patience while we worked on this!

Cheers,
Geoff

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