Website goes down because of Zombie Process

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I have a WordPress website hosted on BigRock.in, and since early December there are some issues coming up on the website (on Shared Hosting). There have been a lot of CPU usage and increase in number of Entry Processes, while the Memory usage is normal.

The issue is not permanent and when it occurs it keeps coming up for a day or two and then fixes on its own. The website stops responding, the browser keeps loading the website but nothing renders on the browser.

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I contacted the support team and they said that the website is not optimized. They said, “It happens if the web requests to your site doesn’t get closed properly upon an execution of a PHP file/process(Zombie processes).”

I don’t know what Zombie processes are. I haven’t made any changes to my website. It has been running for more than 2 years and the issue keeps coming up after every few days, this is happening since December 2013 only. I never faced such an issue before.

Every time the issue comes up/website stops responding, my cPanel also stops responding. I was told that my cPanel is supposed to work if my website is down.

I want to know if my cPanel is not working, then is it a fault of web hosting or my website? Could Zombie process be a reason for my website’s not resolving issue? Is there a way to detect and kill Zombie processes?

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  1. Your host probably has a limit on the amount of server resources your account is allowed to consume at a given time. If your cPanel usage comes out of that allotment, then when your allotted server resources are maxed out, it’s entirely conceivable that you wouldn’t be able to get into cPanel at the same time.

    Any idea what changed in December? Did you upgrade a theme or plugin? Did you upgrade to the new WordPress 3.8? It’s possible that you’re using an old theme that’s not entirely compatible with the latest version of WordPress. If that’s the case, try a new theme and see if your problem resolves.

    Some things you might try to track down the cause of the problem:

    • go through your server logs to see what requests are being made to your site just before you lose access to your site.
    • check your error logs to see if there is something that happens repeatedly. Sometimes a dynamic menu script or wp-cron will try to keep the database connection open after it’s already been closed by another part of the script. If this is preventing the process from closing, that will point you in the right direction.
    • if you’re using a stock theme and it hasn’t been updated recently, update it. If you’re using a custom theme, go through your code and see if it can be optimized for performance.
    • consider using a caching plugin so your server doesn’t have to go through the process of building the page from database queries every time a visitor makes a request. This almost always improves performance.
    • Worst case scenario, the server resources could be getting consumed by an attacker who has gained unauthorized access to your account and is using it to do bad things. Be sure you have a robust security plugin installed. Keep themes and plugins updated, and delete any you’re not using. If you think your account might have been compromised, you could delete everything and rebuild your site from scratch to be certain that it’s now clean; or you could scan it with a script like lookforbadguys.php to try to detect back doors.