Hi,
During March, I started getting 503 errors, especially on my admin side, but now they are getting worse and causing problems on my customer side and my sales are grinding to a halt. My ECT version is 9.7.2, and I'm on Wordpress. I had not made any changes to the site other than routine updates to Wordpress, the plugins, or adding new products to my store as usual. After the last Wordpress update, I seemed to notice some of my links were broken in my wordpress menus, i.e., with Wordpress the links don't have the .php after links like category, product, etc. and suddenly the .php was added back into my link urls. I've been manually fixing them as I find them.

I've been hosted with Servelink for years and I have contacted them for help, but I'm not getting much. Their reply to my first inquiry was:

"Yes, we've been seeing that in regular monitoring over recent weeks. At a high level, it's simply the site running out of resources, principally memory, but also CPU and concurrent processes, and getting throttled to protect it and other users. The site consistently comes up as the top (ab)user, quite notably in the last week, so we actually had already installed some analysis tools a couple of days ago to maybe try and determine what is going on.

Early suggestions are that the category "cat=whatever" pages are causing a lot of load and with 60 products per page there's a lot of work to do to serve those pages. ect-widgets seems to be the heaviest plugin, taking way longer to process than anything else. And there's a lot of scope to improve bot control, which you are not really doing at all and is likely at the root of it, rather than real visitors."

Since getting that info from Peter, I've done the following.:
*Changed my products per page to 12.
*Went into my Wordfence plugin and set limitations for bot control as well as improved the firewall settings.
*I'm not sure if there is anything I can do with the etc-widgets other than disabling them, since they are part of the shopping cart installation. I did remove the 'recently viewed products' widget from my sidebar to see if that helps.
*I've deleted obsolete products, images, and pdf digital download files to free up space.
*I'm trying to figure out how to clear the site cache because I have a bunch of pages showing up in my etc sitemap that look like old posted comments that didn't clear when I deleted them. I installed the plug-in "WP-Optimize - Clean, Compress, Cache".
*I've deleted any plugins that were inactive or that I wasn't using.

I opened a new ticket with Servelink yesterday, but haven't gotten a response yet, so thought I'd post in this forum to see if you have any suggestions.

Hi, it may help if we understand the traffic on your site.
Check your control panel @ Servelink and post back with your traffic / bandwidth usage

If you have a busy site, it's not really abuse as servlink calls it, you just need a private server perhaps.

Thanks,
David

I'm on their Sharing Linux Hosting Pro plan.
25GB SSD storage
500GB transfer
1 hosted website

In my control panel, this stats show as:
Disk space
19718.6 MB

Traffic this month
27094.6 MB

I just heard back from ServeLink after I posted on here with this response:
"We are quite limited in the amount of analysis we can do in the context of a support incident, when it is not a hosting issue. What is happening here is we are intentionally throttling the site when it uses, from time to time, massive amounts of CPU and memory that could impact the stability of other users on the server. So we know why the 503s are there, just not the underlying cause.

The steps you have taken are a good start, however some are vague, for example what is "bot control" doing exactly? PHP version could be bumped, but that's unlikely to make a discernible difference.

The current biggest resource hog looks like the module called wp-optimize. We're also seeing a lot of work with curl_exec, perhaps making requests that can't be fulfilled. This is likely bot-induced as most of the time the site is 100% fine. I might recommend some form of database tuning to make sure all is well there if requests are running slowly under pressure, we could possibly do that or maybe ECT or one of the developers there. That has often shown good results on older/larger databases."

Based on that, I deactivated WP-Optimize which I was trying to use to clear site cache. I wrote back also that the settings I changed in Wordfence for bot or human control is any requests that exceed 120 per minute are throttled and blocked for 30 minutes. I'm off to try to figure out what curl_exec is. I also noticed in my ServeLink control panel it says the ect database isn't connected to a website???

Now I'm going into my ECT Admin and doing the database utility, but having to work around the 503 popups, so hoping it all is processing correctly.

Re the database showing as not assigned to a website. I tried assigning it to DecorativePaintingStore.com, then my wordpress db changed to 'assign to a website', so I changed it back to the way it was. Maybe that the normal way it should be.

I'm grasping at straws. I've had my site on ServeLink for at least 8 years and normally everything runs pretty smoothly until the past month and it seems to be degrading everyday to the point it's practically unfunctional now. Because it has run so easily, I'm haven't had to do much to maintain it and so am very rusty about the mechanics of it.

Hi,

quote:

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Traffic this month
27094.6 MB

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Do you get errors in the off hours when your site has less traffic?

Thanks,
David

Yes, the time doesn’t seem to matter.

I was just on the site and an activity checker said I’m the only visitor at the moment and I got the 503 error when looking at the admin dashboard.