Sudden CPU Usage spike to 100%

[FireDitto]

About 3 hours ago, my CPU Usage spiked to 100% and I've been unable to access the site since. My hosting service (AspirationHosting) have told me the following things;

+ It's the fault of the Theme I installed 3 days ago.
+ It's the fault of the index.php that hasn't been touched since 30 April 2013
+ It's the fault of the warning.php which hasn't been touched since 17 February 2013

I haven't done anything to cause a spike in traffic that I am aware of. The forum is a small RPG group, with maybe 15-20 individual People involved, and I think the max we've ever had on at one time was about 11.

The site was working perfectly when I got online at about 7.30pm. It's now quarter to 11pm and it is still not working.

The Bandwith is also fluctuating between 1840 and 1890 MB, when it was sitting on a solid 17xx yesterday.


They keep telling me to remove the layout -- can I just delete it from the FTP? Will it change the default back to the SMF main layout if I do that? I refuse to do something that might make things worse!


I am REALLY upset and frustrated, so I apologise if I sound snippy or rude!


SMF: 2.0.4
Simpleportal: 2.3.5
Too Many Other Mods To Name

Layout in question: Flux, re-coloured.

[Ricky.]

Tried you site, got timeout error. Certainly your server is busy in something.
You have not mentioned whether its VPS, dedicated or shared ?

You should see this thread first:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=49999.0

[FireDitto]

I don't know? I don't understand any of this!

I'm on the "Aspire" plan:
3GB SSD
30GB Bandwith/Data Transfer
180 Accounts per dedicated server
1 full core CPU Limit
1,024 MB Memory limit
US Server.

Then there is even more information I don't understand about all the specifics and ******. I got the hosting plan through referral from a SMF user here on the forums when I changed from FatCow (ugh). We've been fine for the past 18+ months. This is very frustrating and I have to go to bed because of work tomorrow and I hate having to go when the site is still down

[Ricky.]

Essentially you are on shared hosting with some cloudlinux kind of server. 
You may share some more info like uploading status.php which is mentioned in link I shared.

We need to know more to tell you something about it. As of now, you may disable your forum and one by one disable mods etc see what could be the issue, server error log can also give more details.

[LiroyvH]

Without seeing the processes nor the webserver requests (host can give a copy) it's a bit hard to say how and what from here.
If your template worked fine for multiple days and suddenly it starts working strange; I would find it very strange if that was the culprit...

[Kindred]

well,

1- There are some themes which include extra crap that can use excess resources. However, flux looks pretty clean in that regard
2- You say "too many mods to list" - that is definitely something to think about as well  - perhaps one of the mods has a bug or a malformed query....   

3- you could be the target of a DOS attack...

What your host is reporting is bogus, of course...
index.php is the main file which is loaded for every action...as are template files.

the fact that warning.php is being triggered may suggest that something is hitting your site and triggering that...
Since warning.php is not a standard SMF file, I assume that you have some mod for that...   what does that mod do that triggers the warning page?  Whatever that is could be the source of the attack...

Look in your server logs to see what is being hit...

[FireDitto]

They ended up doing a complete database reinstall from a backup. The site is now working. No idea what the issue was in detail, however.