Is there a program or utility that will tell me what parts of T & S are using server resources? Right now, I’ve got cpanel, and that’s it. So I can watch our resource use spike, and I can turn off plugins. And I can pull the index offline. And see if that helps any. But it would be nice if I could get a more exact picture. (i.e., “server use – 10. Breakdown: 2.0 for index.php, 1.0 for wp-comments-post.php, and 7.0 for blacklist.php” which would tell me “aha, the blacklist is what’s tying up resources”).
Suggestions?
Write a script that polls your server CPU(s) every minute or so, and log that info with date/time. Then look at your web server logs to see what the correlation is. Also check your web server error logs.
If you’re unsing linux or unix, you can open two windows, run “top” in one, and “tail -f {/path/to/access/log}” in the other. You may be able to see what the problem is in real time.
ps -aux
that will tell you what processes are running and what resources they are consuming.
I don’t know any of the evil details of WP, so I can’t be much help there.
Kaimi, you really need to mirror the site offline so you can experiment without affecting the actual site.
SNMP or RMON or even just a packet sniffer like ethereal running on a router/firewall can help give you an idea of what’s eating up the traffic, if that helps any.
You might also find MRTG useful: http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/