System Resources limited

[adean]

I recently migrated my sites to a newhosting provider.
I have 7 cpanels on the VPS.

One is a news website that uses Joomla 3.4. I started the site in 2006 with Joomla and updated and upgraded the site throughout the many years. I am not really a tech guy, but I have been able to sort through the problems that have cropped up over the years with the website. Now, however, I am scratching my head. The pages are not loading. I get 503 and 508 error codes when the page finally fails.

I have used the same SJ News template from Smart Add-ons for many years.


The site is hosted on
Server Version: Apache/2.4.10 (Unix) OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_bwlimited/1.4 Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.9
Server MPM: prefork
Server Built: Oct 20 2014 14:11:14


Processor Information
Total processors: 4
Processor #1
Vendor
GenuineIntel
Name
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Speed
2101.000 MHz
Cache
15360 KB
Processor #2
Vendor
GenuineIntel
Name
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Speed
1200.000 MHz
Cache
15360 KB
Processor #3
Vendor
GenuineIntel
Name
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Speed
1200.000 MHz
Cache
15360 KB
Processor #4
Vendor
GenuineIntel
Name
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz
Speed
2101.000 MHz
Cache
15360 KB

I am unable to access the Joomla admin panel. I thought I might try to uninstall some of the extensions that are not being used. And maybe disable some of the extensions that are being used.

I disabled Smart Search months ago to resolve indexing problems that seemed to hang the site.

I do not have commenting installed. (for example, I don't have k2 installed)

I have a daily email that goes out through an Acymailing extension. That has never been a problem.

I have JCE editor installed.

Beyond that, I haven't loaded any 3rd party extensions that I can remember. Certainly nothing recently.

I can access logs but I don't know what I am looking for. Where should I begin?

[adean]

Tech support reports:
I am seeing your site hitting a lot of issues with running out of process slots and causing errors. This would be why you were seeing the 503 error. I have increased your available process slots to attempt to alleviate the issue. Please take a moment to look over the site and make sure it is functioning properly. If there is anything else we can assist you with, please feel free to let us know.

Error Log:
[Sun Mar 29 11:03:52.965468 2015] [fcgid:warn] [pid 5091] [client 68.180.228.185:35796] mod_fcgid: can't apply process slot for /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5
[Sun Mar 29 11:03:55.682553 2015] [fcgid:warn] [pid 5031] [client 66.249.65.183:45732] mod_fcgid: can't apply process slot for /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5
[Sun Mar 29 11:03:56.495486 2015] [fcgid:warn] [pid 5658] [client 54.214.49.45:42220] mod_fcgid: can't apply process slot for /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5, referer:


The pages still fail to load

[adean]

Tech support reports the problem is a result of DDoS attacks.

The site seems to be getting hit with a DDoS attack, which is filling up the cPanel user's FastCGI process slots. I've temporarily changed your server to use suPHP instead of FastCGI for PHP processing to work around this problem. The change here is you will see higher CPU usage when processing a lot of PHP requests, where FastCGI uses more memory over CPU. In the long run you will want to implement protection against these types of attacks via a third party CDN such as CloudFlare.

The site is responding for the moment.