Tong Family

Just testing to see what is going on, I installed a bunch of monitoring plugins. One thing that I discovered quickly is that when I rebooted the system, I was constantly at 100% CPU and then on reboot, it dropped down to the more normal 20-40%, but after a little bit, the CPU load shot up again. In looking htop, I saw a huge number of Apache2 processes start which is pretty surprising. There are now no less than seven different Apache jobs running right now doing something.

So something is very definitely wrong. I guess I’m back to the age old, keep deactivating plugins to figure out what is wrong but in looking at the query monitor, I see 146 call and I can see that:

1. 75 are from Cloudinary
2. 33 are from All-in-one SEO
3. 14 are from Jetpack Social
4. 10 are from WordPress Core

So I’m guessing there is some background process that Cloudinary is running right but I can’t quite figure out what it is. So off to turn all that stuff off.

OK, so let’s try turning as many plug-ins off as possible

After looking at all this stuff, I suspect Cloudinary, but I’m back to the old-school way, it sure does look like some process is kicking off in the background, so I turned literally everything off and CPU utilization promptly dropped to 0.39 load average and not it’s time to turn things on and it looks like it was some sort of stuck process as the system returned to normal levels, but here is my guess:

1. Mastodon related plugins. The system now acts like a full Mastodon instance, so I suspect the reason there were so many Apache2 processes was that it was pulling from there. Maybe because a post causes ActivityPub to pull things. I know that I can see posts from a Mastodon site, so it is working.
2. All in one SEO. This is doing a lot behind the scenes
3. Cloudinary. This was also generating lots of calls and having to do background work to process images.

It could also very well be that all the monitoring and performance plugs in’s I’ve put in are causing the problem. The net is that it seems to be running normally now but I see the load creeping up as soon as I added the Mastodon-related ones.

When I choose Save Draft, then CPU utilization does seem to rise

The fact that this started with a post sort of implies it is related to the post logic. In any case, I’m getting no more than 2-4 apache2 processes right now. I also see from Query Monitor that the Cloudinary SQL accesses jump up.