CPU Throttling & Cannot Connect to SQL Database

[dracameg]

See attachments for Status and PhpInfo. I couldn't link - says "You are not allowed to post external links"

Shared hosting - bluehost (I know this is oversold hosting) but moving hosting providers should be an absolute last option. I'm helping a couple of friends with this as I've a bit more programming experience with PHP and PHPBB and learning SMF.

Issue:
This started earlier this week - we haven't made very many changes however we experienced a huge explosion of new members, going from 50 to 150 in a matter of days. Posts are around 10k at this time. On Monday, we started seeing the error message:

Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.

Doing some investigations, I noticed that CPU Throttling was very high.

"During the past 24 hours your account has been throttled for a total of 64461.284 seconds."

Bluehost Support says to check the MySQL Slow Queries. I did and it's really not that bad. Yesterday, only 2 (in the morning and in the evening) which correlated with 30+ users online.  The avarage number of files on a daily basis is around 3 which I'm not too alarmed about.

Bluehost Support recommended installing xcache however they said "we don't support it so install it at your own risk". I tried that, it made the problem a lot worse so I uninstalled it.

Error Log in Cpanel - nothing there that would correlate with this issue. Reviewing the status and phpinfo, I think that these messages are because we are on a shared server. But I'm no expert.

MODs:
Custom BBCode   2.03
Voter Visibility   1.01
Order Custom Profile Fields   1.1.1
SubAccounts Mod   1.0.1
Hide Signatures from Guests   2.0
Member Color Link   3.1
Hide Avatars from Guests   2.1
Member Awards   2.2.3
Users Online Today   2.0.2
Topic Descriptions   1.2
PM to New Members   1.2
SEO Sitemap   2.2.1
Join Reason   1.3
Hide User Names from Guests   1.1
SimplePortal   2.3.5 NOTE: We are using ShoutBox however I did turn down the caching and minimized it as much as possible, CPU Throttling was still high and we still got the errors.

Help please? If I need to supply more information, let me know.

[Colin]

Is the forum the only piece of dynamic web software that you are running on that account?

[dracameg]

The only active one, yes. I believe that there is a test SMF (barebones) and another SMF board that the admins used to start building the site and then moved to a new folder to match the domain name. There are no other active dynamic web software.

[Colin]

What I would try is disabling the shoutout box completely to see diagnose if that is the problematic script. If not we can go from there.

[dracameg]

Since I couldn't do that on the live site, I cloned it and set it up on a different Bluehost account of a friend's. I turned off the 2 chatboxes that were being used and that seemed to have done the trick. The MOD itself is SimplePortal.

We are looking at a different Chat MOD but we really like the Shoutbox and its flexibility to be on the main forum page. So I'd like to try to fix this but I suppose I should go over to MOD support.

[tumbleweed]

Chat boxes are known resource killers. Chances are you will need to find a provider that offers larger chunks of CPU resources to run your Chat if it gets used much. Since your provider is of the "Unlimited" variety they most likely have tight restrictions on those areas.