I have a shared server account with Lunarpages that I have been using for the past three years to host a fan wiki for a tv show. Everything was running smoothly until about a month or so ago. It was a couple of weeks after I had updated to Mediawiki 1.15 (I had been using 1.13 previously). I got a message from Lunarpages that index.php was using too much of the server's processor power (spiking from 1.3% - 2.5% cpu, the allowable limit on the shared server is 1% ).
They disabled the script until I could find a solution. There was a fatal error that I noticed in my php error log:
[20-Jul-2009 16:57:40] PHP Fatal error: require() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required '{EDIT}//w/includes/parser/LinkHolderArray.php' (include_path='/{EDIT}/w:/{EDIT}/w/includes:/{EDIT}/w/languages:.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /{EDIT}//w/includes/AutoLoader.php on line 582
Shortly before the incident, 1.15.1 had come out and it did have some bugfixes so I upgraded, figuring the error may have been the cause of the spike. After the upgrade, I noticed no more fatal errors. The issue seemed to go away for a bit, until I got a notice a couple of days later of another spike:
Average %CPU usage - 1.35 Average %Memory usage - 0.82 Average %MySQL usage - 0.1
{EDIT} 1.35 0.82 0.1 Top Process %CPU 50.0 [php-cgi] Top Process %CPU 43.0 [php-cgi] Top Process %CPU 34.0 /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /{EDIT}/public_html/w/index.php
Is my wiki just outgrowing the shared host? In the past 6 months my daily averages have been ~15-31k hits amongst 500-1000 visitors. Any ideas what I can reasonably expect Mediawiki to support while staying under my host's 1% load (I'm not sure of their hardware....) Are there certain questions I should be asking the tech support people to try to narrow down where the issue lies?
Are there any configuration settings I should know about that could minimize the load? I've already turned off all the ajax functions.
I really can't afford a dedicated server just for a hobby site, but I'd hate to have to bring the wiki down. It'd also be a pain to find a new host since I just this month paid for the next year of hosting. Thanks for all the help you can offer.
-F.t. Petracca