Site down due to Script running associated with CRON plugin

Hola Jose

Our site is hosted with SiteGround and it went down with SiteGround saying it was overloading the CPU resources.  It was traced to the Security Check Pro Cron Plugin.  When the plugin is disabled, the site comes back.

Please see the attached STRACE screenshot.

If you need FTP access or anything further please let me know.

Thanks and regards
Brett

Hi Brett,

How is the cron configured? To launch only an integrity scan?

This is always a matter of resources, usually limited in shared servers. The heaviest task is the integrity scan, that needs to get a hash of every file and compare it with previous value. This consumes CPU and memory, but for a typical Joomla site of should end in a few seconds. For instance, my site takes 15 seconds to analyze 23k files.

There are a couple of things you can do to limit the resources needed; you can set "scan only executable files" to "yes" and also choose "include exceptions in database to "no" (global configuration -> tuning tab).

Regards,
Jose

Thanks Jose

Scheduled task is to Alternate Permissions & Integrity Checking
Launching Interval is 2:00 - 3:00
Periodicity is Weekly

It seems like once the Cron is triggered, something "breaks" - the site is fine for a while then goes down. I assume that this is triggered when the Cron runs.

Even now as soon as I enable the Cron plugin, the site goes down immediately.

I ran a manual File Manager check and it took 3 seconds.
I ran a manual File Integrity check and it took 9 seconds.

I then did an "Initialize Data" then a "Dtabase Opimization" and it seems OK.

I will schedule the Cron job for later today and see how it goes.

Thanks and regards
Brett
 

Hi Brett,

The site goes down means you get a 500 error (or a blank page) or that takes infinitely to show info?

In the first case maybe there is a missing file because it's odd you get the issue once the cron plugin is enabled... With those times launching manually tasks you should not have problems launching them by Cron.

Regards,
Jose

Yes - by site down I mean a 500 or 504 error as the site takes forever to load.

Thanks
Brett

Ok, if that happens again send me FTP credentials to check what's happening.

Regards,
Jose