How to reduce the number of executions generated by your website?

Knowledgebase Article

How to reduce the number of executions generated by your website?

Our shared and reseller servers have software in place, that limit the total amount of resources (such as memory and CPU processor) each cPanel account can use.

This is to help ensure that one account does not overload the server and cause downtime for other customers.

These limits can be found in more detail here:

Shared Hosting - http://www.kualo.com/webhosting/resource-usage-policy

Reseller Hosting - http://www.kualo.com/resellers/resource-usage-policy

The total usage of all websites running within an account may not exceed these limits:

Perform more than 1,300 dynamic page executions (PHP/CGI) in one hour.

Perform more than 13,000 dynamic page executions (PHP/CGI) in one day.

A "dynamic execution" is an execution of a PHP or CGI script in your account.

An example of a single execution is when a visitor opens your website and your index PHP file is loaded. The more visitors your website has, the more executions will be generated.

Please note that this is valid only for dynamically generated content. If you open an image or an HTML page a new execution will not be generated on the server. Executions are counted for the following scripting languages - PHP, CGI etc.

You can review the usage statistics directly in your cPanel account.

In cPanel you will see a section labeled "1H Software" with various usage statistics available:

The items within the HTTP and Memory usage statistics revolve around:

Executions - the number of times something was performed

Realtime - How many seconds it took the execution to complete

A high number of executions and a low realtime can mean a high amount of traffic, while a low number of executions but a high realtime can mean poor coding.

If you are seeing a "Website Temporarily Unavailable" notice on your website, this means your account is using roughly about 3 times as much resources as we allow.

The most common cause for that would be either something unusual happening to your website, or in the better case - a legitimate peak in your visitors and traffic. Either way, it can be addressed and handled.

It is possible that the high number of executions is not generated by legitimate visitors but search engine spiders or bad bots, and you may be able to lower it by taking the appropriate actions.

Awstats can help you investigate and identify unusual activity that has caused high number of executions. It produces visual statistics about visitors to your website.

There are three sections in Awstats that you can check to identify a possible issue:

1) Hosts (Top 25):

This section displays a table of Hosts (Hostnames or IPs), that have accessed your website.

If you note an extensive number of visits or Bandwidth generated by a certain Host, you can block it from accessing your website to prevent possible DDoS attack.

For example, if you notice huge number of requests from Chinese IP and your visitors are mainly from Europe then you can block the Chinese IPs to reduce the number of executions.

Please refer to our tutorials here:

How To: Block IPs via an .htaccess file

How to use the IP Deny Manager in cPanel

2) Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25):

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing use bots, called spiders, which crawl your website to index it on the Internet. Visits to your website from such spiders are recorded within this section. It could happen that a spider aggressively crawls your website and generates too many executions. If you notice many Hits from a certain spider, you can change it's crawl rate or block it entirely.

More information here: Understanding & Controlling Web Crawlers

3) Viewed: Pages-URL (Top 25):

The Pages-URL (Top 25) provides useful information about which page of your website is most viewed.

The most common execution generators are application login pages. Very often websites are abused by bots trying to gain administrative access. If you see many requests to your website's admin area, you will have to take actions and protect it.

We have outlined the process for the most common applications:

WordPres: Protecting WordPress from distributed brute force attacks

Joomla: Use cPanel's Password Protected Directories

Should you have any questions?

Feel free to contact us via the Open Ticket section within your MyKualo client area: