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Ways of resolving resource overusage issues
What is resource overusage and why would you see an error message
All Shared Hosting plans have resource limits set by CloudLinux LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) - resources include CPU, physical memory, entry processes and number of processes. If your account starts hitting resource limits regularly, this is resource overuse, and you will either see an error message or your website will work slower.
3 codes you are likely to see are 508, 500 or 503.
- Code 508: means your entry processes have reached the limit
- Code 500/503: means a number of processes have reached the limit
If the limit has been reached by one of the domains, all other domain names hosted in the account will be affected as they share the same resources.
Below are steps to find, and resolve resource overuse. Also, you can use our troubleshooter system that will help you to resolve this issue step-by-step.
Step 1: How to check your usage and limit
Log into your hosting control panel (cPanel) to view your current usage under the Statistics section. Your login details are different from your Namecheap account login and were sent in your Hosting Welcome Guide. If you don’t have this to hand, you can contact customer support who will resend the email to you or reset your password. You can access your cPanel via Namecheap Dashboard and from http://yourdomain.tld/cpanel or https://servername:2083 links.
It’s a good idea to monitor your usage regularly and over specific time periods to ensure you can take action if it starts to get close to your limits. You can do this easily by clicking on the Resource Usage menu in your cPanel.
Example: The red high usage sign is indicating CPU usage has reached 94% and that current processes may be causing overuse:
Step 2: If you have reached your limit: how to fix excessive resource usage
Code 508: If you receive this error on your website you can still access cPanel with the servername link https://servername:2083
to disable or modify scripts that cause overuse.
Step 3: Understand which processes are impacting usage limits: code 500, 503 and 508
If issues last for more than a few minutes:
Check the running processes at the time of overuse or contact our customer services team who will be happy to do this for you .
If your issues last for a few seconds: As its only for a short period we won’t be able to check this for you but do recommend you look at the resource usage over a specific time by clicking on Resource Usage via your cPanel. This may give you an indication of what resources are reaching their limits.
Step 4: Once you have identified which process are impacting your limit, some of the most common ways to reduce usage can be found in the Troubleshooting section below.
If none of these resolve your overuse please contact our customer service team who will be happy to help.
Want to check for process by accessing commands via SSH? Go to Step 5
Step 5: Checking your current processes if you have access to SSH (if you would like SSH access contact our customer services who can enable this for you)
If you have access to commands via SSH you can check processes which are currently running with the command top -c. This will enable you to see which process(s) use most of your resources such as CPU and virtual memory. You will also be able to identify the number of tasks and whether these are running, sleeping or have stopped. If the process is generated by a script, the simplest way to disable use of this script is to rename it. Or you can create a Deny from all record in the .htaccess file where the problem script resides.
Below is a handy guide to understand in more detail how to run the top -c commands. You can find more details here.
Example: Processes running and status
The first line shows: the current time, time since last boot, logged in user session and average system load (over the last minute, 5 and 15 minutes)
The second line indicates the total processes, running, sleeping, stopped, and zombie (that have been terminated but have not been properly removed).
The third line shows how the CPU is used in %:
us
user processes
sy
system processes
ni
priority upgrade nice
wa
time waiting for I/O completion
hi
hardware interrupts
si
software interrupts
st
time stolen from the virtual machine by the hypervisor task
The fourth and the fifth lines show memory usage (RAM): total, used, free and buffers. The first row shows physical memory and the second one shows virtual memory (swap) of the server.
The next rows provide details on the current processes:
PID
ID of the process
USER
the user that is the owner of the process
PR
priority of the process
NI
nice value of the process
VIRT
virtual memory used by the process
RES
physical memory used by the process
SHR
shared memory used by the process
S
status of the process (S - sleeping, D - uninterruptible sleep, R - running, T - stopped, Z - zombie)
%CPU
percentage of CPU used by this process
%MEM
percentage of physical memory used by this process
TIME+
total cpu time used by the process
COMMAND
name of the process
Troubleshooting:
• Recent site updates: If this is the first time you have had resource usage issues check the latest updates you’ve made to your site. Recent changes may be impacting your usage levels.
• New plugins/themes: If you have installed a new plugin or a theme, try disabling it and monitor the impact on your account's performance for at least 10 minutes.
NOTE: Changes will not take effect immediately. You will need to monitor website performance for about an hour, if nothing changes contact customer support who are available 24/7.
• Increases in site traffic: Go to Awstats menu in cPanel. This will provide information about visitors to your site and will enable you to understand if there has been a recent spike in number of visits. If you do notice a growing number of visitors, and are having resource outages, we recommend that you review your current plan or contact customers services who will be able to help.
