Ever increasing Physical Memory Usage since switching hosts

[Ted Grapler]

Hi,

I have a 1.54 cart upgraded from 1.50 for past 5 or so years. PHP 5.6. Add-ons Easy Populate, Zen Litebox, Image Handler4, and Edit Orders. And a third party template. I think that is it.

Last week my previous host had some issues so after a 24+ hour outage so switched back to a host that had previously hosted my site on for about a year. Am on shared hosting.

Under cPanel main page previously had usually seen 0 under Physical Memory Usage. Sometimes I would see a little usage usually something like 150 mb.

Since I switched back last few days Physical Memory usage keeps going higher and higher. This morning was around 400mb, now it's up to almost 600mb and I have never seen it that high before. On previous host when I checked CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage stats it averaged around 150-250 I think.

I put my site in Maintenance mode but this has no effect on memory usage. My site is in a subfolder under Public_HTML and when I take the site offline by changing the name of the folder to a random name the memory usage drops to 0. Change it back to correct name and instantly memory usage is back around 600mb. Checked and there are only one or two recent users online and maybe 10 recent spiders.

I sell used stuff like collectibles, stereo stuff, toys, books, games, etc. and consider the site to be "low volume". Average page views a day maybe 500-600, sometimes more or less. I do have a LOT of items online maybe 5000 and lots and lots of photos, and there are always a bunch of spiders crawling the site. The number of users and spiders has not increased recently. I haven't added many items recently.

Average bandwidth a month is usually 13gig.

Haven't made any major changes to site in quite a while and things had been going pretty smoothly except for some unrelated email problems. The site seems pretty slow and not sure if this is host or caused by memory issues. Currently am keeping it offline.

I think something may be seriously wrong and would very much appreciate any advice or suggestions.

Thanks.

[Website Rob]

cPanel main page does not normally show the information you are describing and if it does it is usually for the Server usage. As you have a Shared Hosting account your usage would be part of that.

With that said, there are many things one can do to increase site performance and I recommend using a tool like https://gtmetrix.com/. Signing up for a Free account is definitely recommended as you can keep comparisons of various dates, before and after you've made changes, to help you track what is working.

[Ted Grapler]

My cPanel does show that info. See attached photo. The Monthly Bandwidth Transfer of 30.72 KB is incorrect, not sure why.

[Ted Grapler]

And here is screenshot of 24 hours of CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage stats right after I changed the name of the folder, you can see how Memory Usage goes to zero right at the end of graph

[Website Rob]

There is probably no quick fix to current problems without doing Research. AwStats in cPanel can tell you more about site connections (perhaps someone is linking to your images or pages for example) and GTMetrix can tell where to make site improvements (perhaps images can be resized, is gzip turned on, and other good info).

[Ted Grapler]

Thanks Rob for the responses. I checked AW Stats and a few other reporting tools but don't see anything that stands out.

Put site back online and Physical Memory Usage stayed right under 600mb for about 10 hours or so, then made an abrupt drop to around 400mb, stayed there for a while before creeping up a bit.

I contacted hosting co. support and told them of my concern, just got the response "your website is working fine".

Starting to think my site may have always used been using a fair amount of memory and it just wasn't being displayed in cPanel correctly. Was concerned that something new was happening and there was an issue. and it would just rising up until it hit the 1024mb limit at which point might get cut off. But there seems to be a limit around 600mb. Maybe just the way server is set up and they are caching parts of my site, really have no idea just glad it's probably not an issue, hope it stays that way.

[DrByte]

The difference in reporting of information could be related to slightly different architecture of the hardware behind it all, too. There are a lot of factors that could make the reported data between different servers show different, despite running so-called "identical" software. And it's possible that the server's core software may also be configured differently between servers, and that's impacting how your small "slice" of the server shows up in graphs. It may not actually affect performance at all. Or it might truly be indicative of a problem.

(If it were a dedicated server, then I'd inspect the MySQL ini configs to see how much RAM it's configured to consume, and look at other running processes to see if they're necessary or tuned properly. And other optimizations. But since you're on shared hosting, many of those are moot, and "likely" aren't driving those reported graph stats.)


Given that your host thinks things are fine (in theory they "should" know whether yours is "the same as" or "better than" the majority of other accounts on your server), use what you're observing now as a "baseline", and keep an eye on it periodically. Both you and Website Rob have been talking about this in your posts.

[RodG]

Just another 2cents worth...

Under cPanel main page previously had usually seen 0 under Physical Memory Usage. Sometimes I would see a little usage usually something like 150 mb.

Since I switched back last few days Physical Memory usage keeps going higher and higher. This morning was around 400mb, now it's up to almost 600mb and I have never seen it that high before. On previous host when I checked CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage stats it averaged around 150-250 I think.

Personally, I'd be somewhat ignoring those reports. What you think is abnormally high is what I would consider ridiculously low for a zencart site - To be reporting such little memory usage would imply that the memory usage of the SQL server isn't being factored in - IOW, all you are seeing is the memory 'slice' being used by the webserver for your specific domain. A variance between different severs could be related to many things outside of your control such as the PHP version being used.

It can certainly be useful to keep a watch on reports such as this for 'baseline' purposes, and *over time* you will observe some kind of pattern to the usage -- For example, the memory usage may grow from 150mb to 800mb over a period of a week or so, or less, then it'll drop back to the 150mb and the cycle will repeat - perhaps not in the exact same way, but very similar... It can take a month or more to 'learn' this pattern before you'll be able to say with any degree of certainty that 'hey, something abnormal is going on here'.

The site seems pretty slow and not sure if this is host or caused by memory issues.

No easy answer to this one I'm afraid, especially as 'host' and 'memory' can't be segregated in this manner - Not to mention that different folk have a different definition of what a 'host' actually is (technically, it is a machine, but many folk consider the person or company supplying the service as the 'host').

Cheers
Rod.

PS. If you were running a zencart site on a VPS, then unless you have *at least* 1Gbyte of memory then slowness is assured. Shared servers are a different kettle of monkeys though. :)

[carlwhat]

if your site is slow, as others have pointed out, use https://gtmetrix.com/ and correct those issues.

in my experience, the biggest slowdown is database access. you want to ensure that the server where your database resides is on SSDs as opposed to HDDs. solid state drives provide much greater speed and will make a huge difference in the performance of a ZC site.

note that some hosts can say they host using SSDs while putting your database on a server with HDDs.

if you have ssh access to the DB server, you can use the following code to test speed. a SSD drive will come back with results under 1 second:

time for i in `seq 1 1000`; do
    dd bs=4k if=/dev/sda count=1 skip=$(( $RANDOM * 128 )) >/dev/null 2>&1;
done;

good luck.

[Ted Grapler]

Thanks for the info carlwhat, RobG and DrByte.

Today the site seems speedy, tried while on the road from different ISP too and faster than usual. Don't have SSH access. I think will just check the cPanel Physical Memory Usage stats once a week or so instead of worrying about it unless the site is showing issues. In meantime working on a fresh install of 1.5.5e and transferring product and customer info over, setting up the look and feel, testing, etc.- have been putting this off for too long.