Understanding Resource Usage in cPanel

Knowledgebase Article

Understanding Resource Usage in cPanel

Welcome to our comprehensive guide on understanding resource usage in cPanel! This article is designed to help you master the management of your website's resources, starting from foundational concepts and progressing to more advanced topics. Whether you're a newcomer to web hosting or seeking to enhance your knowledge, we present the information in an easy-to-understand format.

Use the menu below to navigate quickly to specific sections of the article that interest you.

Setting the Stage: Your Website in Our Digital Festival

Picture Kualo as the organiser of a sprawling digital festival, where every website is a distinct act hitting its own stage. The kind of stage you need—be it a quaint booth for acoustic sessions, a robust platform for a jazz ensemble, or a grand amphitheatre for rock concerts—depends on the nature of your act (your website) and the crowd it draws (web traffic).

Our hosting plans are like the variety of stages across this festival landscape. Got a startup or a personal blog? You'll likely start out on one of our smaller stages, designed just for solo acts or small groups just starting to gather a crowd.

But what happens when your site starts drawing in the masses, akin to a band whose tunes have started topping the charts? Well, that's when you consider moving up to a bigger stage—with all the advanced tech specs to handle your growing fanbase.

Choosing the right stage—essentially picking the most suitable hosting plan—means ensuring your site can handle its traffic effortlessly. You want every visitor to rock out to your website content without a glitch, ensuring they leave with awesome memories.

Harmony and Order with CloudLinux

To maintain a harmonious atmosphere at our digital festival and ensure no website becomes a 'noisy neighbour'—imagine a band blasting their bass so loud that it drowns out the performances on your stage—we implement CloudLinux on our shared hosting servers. Think of CloudLinux as a vigilant stage manager, dedicated to ensuring that no single act overwhelms the venue and impacts other performances.

If another website starts consuming excessive resources, CloudLinux intervenes to moderate their usage, effectively preventing them from overshadowing your website. This allows your site to continue delivering its content effectively and ensures that your audience enjoys a seamless experience.

But what if it's your act that's gaining traction? You certainly don't want your performance dampened. So, do you immediately need a bigger stage?

And what if your website is slowing down, yet your audience hasn't grown significantly?

Before your website is primed to handle a larger crowd, it might be time to optimise your digital stage.

Optimising your Digital Stage

Sometimes a website uses resources inefficiently not because it's teeming with visitors, but because it's like a band playing with instruments that aren't quite in tune or with a sound system that malfunctions. This won't just annoy the crowd—it might even drive them away before the next song. Similarly, if your website has slow load times or frequent errors, it can frustrate visitors, causing them to leave prematurely.

Before you consider stepping up to a larger "digital stage," make sure your current performance is spotless. Optimising your website means fine-tuning your code, accelerating database queries, and ensuring that content delivery is seamless and speedy. Check out our article on Op

But at our digital festival, even the smaller stages can be enhanced to captivate a larger crowd. Installing bigger screens or upgrading to a more potent sound system can make those at the back feel as engaged as those in the front row. Similarly, on your website, implementing advanced caching techniques, utilising a content delivery network (CDN), and optimising images can dramatically improve how your site handles traffic. These tools boost your site’s speed and efficiency, allowing you to entertain more visitors without needing to expand your digital footprint—much like how superior audiovisual tech can mesmerise an audience without moving to a bigger venue.

When Unwanted Traffic Takes the Mic

Sometimes, the crowd at a concert isn’t there for the music. Maybe they’re causing disruptions or they’re just passively occupying space. On your website, these could be bots, spammers, or malicious attackers—digital nuisances that consume your resources without contributing to your goals.

Just as security personnel at a festival keep the order and ensure everyone's there for the right reasons, robust cybersecurity measures on your website filter out these unwanted visitors, keeping your resources dedicated to real, engaged users.

If you're experiencing resource issues without seeing corresponding business benefits, it might be time to bolster your cyber defenses. Enhancing your site’s resilience against unwanted traffic can prevent resource wastage and improve overall efficiency. For detailed strategies on how to detect, manage, and mitigate the impact of bots on your server, check out our comprehensive guide on Managing Bot Traffic.

This approach will help ensure that your resources are devoted to genuine visitors who are there to enjoy what you have to offer, not just to take up space.

Stepping Up to the Main Stage

However, if your audience genuinely outgrows the current setup—despite all the optimisations and high-tech enhancements—it's akin to a band that’s ready to headline a major festival. Upgrading to a larger hosting plan is like moving to that grand stage, ready to entertain thousands with the robust support needed to make the event a hit.

By systematically refining your website's mechanics and strategically enhancing its capacity through technology, you will be able to to accommodate more traffic smoothly. When you've maximised these strategies and still see growth, transitioning to a larger hosting plan ensures your website can continue to excel. Whether it’s Business Web Hosting for more substantial shared plans or stepping up further to VPS and Dedicated Hosting solutions, each option provides the infrastructure to support your site’s expanding audience.

If you’re unsure which hosting solution is the best fit for your growing needs, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our team is here to help you ensure that every visitor to your site has a memorable and seamless experience, just as a well-managed concert leaves every attendee buzzing with excitement.

Understanding Resources

To help you manage your website effectively, we've compiled a comprehensive table detailing the key resources of your hosting plan. This section will explain each resource, its function, and the consequences of exceeding the limits defined by your plan. By understanding these, you’ll be better equipped to keep your site running smoothly, and help you steer clear of those red-line limits that could put a dent in your digital presence.

Resource	Description	Impact of Reaching Limit	Festival Analogy
CPU	Maximum CPU cores your site can use.	Slows Down: Tasks wait for available CPU power, slowing down the website.	Think of the CPU as the main stage where all the performances happen. The bigger and more powerful the stage, the more performers (processes) it can support at one time.
Memory (RAM)	Maximum RAM your applications can use.	Errors: Exceeding this limit can cause processes to terminate unexpectedly, leading to 503 or 500 errors.	RAM is like the quick-change area just off stage, stocked with guitars for the next song and props for the next act, allowing for swift transitions and continuous performances.
Entry Processes (EP)	Maximum simultaneous PHP requests your site can handle.	503 Errors: Exceeding this limit prevents new web processes, causing a 503 error for new visitors.	Entry Processes like the ticket turnstiles at a festival. Each turnstile allows one attendee through at a time. If all turnstiles are in use, new attendees must wait until one becomes available.
Number of Processes (NPROC)	Maximum number of total tasks that can run at once.	Service Impact: Exceeding this limit affects all types of processes, potentially leading to 503 errors across your site or other functions like email to stop working.	This is like the total number of staff and performers that can be backstage at any one time. Too many people backstage can cause overcrowding and confusion.
I/O Usage	Speed limit for data moving to/from your storage.	Slows Operations: Tasks don't stop but will run slower, much like being in traffic.	Similar to the pathways inside the venue, there’s a limit to how much traffic these paths can handle before causing a jam.
IOPS	Max number of input/output operations per second.	Slows Operations: Causes read/write operations to pause briefly, waiting until the next second to continue, similar to waiting in line at a busy concession stand.	Like the number of transactions that can happen at the concession stands per second. Exceeding this means queues get longer because transactions are delayed to the next second.
Inodes	Total count of files and folders you can have.	No New Files: Reaching this limit stops new files from being created, affecting site functionality and email services.	Inodes are like the total number of gear items—guitar cases, amps, costume racks—you can pack into your tour truck. Each file in your hosting account is like a piece of gear. If your truck is full, you can't add anything new.

How to Access Resource Usage

Log into cPanel: Start by accessing your cPanel dashboard using your credentials.
Find the Resource Usage Section: Scroll through your cPanel home screen or use the search bar to find the “Resource Usage” icon.

Dashboard Overview

The Resource Usage section in cPanel provides an overview of your website's resource consumption, specifically focusing on whether you've reached any of your plan’s resource limits in the last 24 hours.

This is invaluable if you've recently experienced issues such as a 503 error or unusually slow website performance. It allows you to quickly determine whether these problems were caused by hitting resource limits, providing a clear indication of when your site's demands have exceeded the available resources and that action should be taken.

As the dashboard shows only data is from the last 24 hours, if you see limits have been reached, it doesn’t mean this is the case right now. Similarly, if you see no issues, it doesn’t mean that there haven't been issues beyond the last 24 hours.

If you have alerts on the main dashboard about exceeding resource limits, clicking on "View Details" will take you to the "Current Usage" tab where you can find out more.

If you haven't exceeded resources recently, you can still navigate to this tab to review usage over a period longer than the last 24 hours, such as checking for limits reached during earlier timeframes.

Understanding the 'Current Usage' Tab in cPanel

The "Current Usage" tab in cPanel provides a comprehensive view of your website's resource usage, both in real-time and over the last 24 hours (by default). This section is instrumental for monitoring resource consumption and understanding performance trends. It contains the following:

Real-Time Resource Usage Table: At the top of this tab, a table displays the current real-time usage of resources such as CPU, RAM, and Entry Processes. This snapshot helps you gauge the immediate demands on your website.
Usage Graphs: Below the real-time data, there are graphs depicting resource usage over the last 24 hours. These graphs provide a visual representation of how resources have been consumed over time, highlighting any spikes or periods of excessive use.
Detailed Table Breakdown: Below the graphs, there is a table that details the usage over the same period, broken down by the hour.

By default, the graphs and data shown reflect the last 24 hours. However, you can adjust this setting to view resource usage over different periods, providing flexibility to track performance based on your specific needs.

Understanding the Graphs

The graphs provide a visual representation of your website's resource consumption over time. Here's an explanation of what each colour in the graphs represents:

Green Line (Average): This line shows the average resource usage over the selected time period. It helps you see general trends and patterns in how resources are being utilised by your website.
Red Line (Limit): The red line indicates the maximum limit of resources that your hosting plan allows. If your usage approaches or hits this line, it means you are nearing or reaching the capacity allocated to you, which could potentially lead to issues or restrictions on your website's functionality.
Blue Line (Database): This line appears only if your database usage is being specifically tracked and restricted. It shows how much of the resource is being used by database operations specifically, helping you understand the impact of your database on overall resource consumption.
Light Blue Markers (Faults): These markers indicate instances where your website has exceeded the resource limits, known as 'faults'. A 'fault' occurs when your website attempts to exceed the resource limits of your hosting plan. A CPU, I/O, or IOPS limits being reached may cause your website to slow down, but won’t cause errors. These limits throttle the speed at which processes can operate. On the other hand, NPROC, EP and PMEM faults may result in errors, such as "503 Service Unavailable" error. This is since these faults can lead to process termination or prevent new processes from starting.

The last graph, which is the “Fault Graph”, provides a detailed breakdown of the specific limits that were exceeded, depicted through different colours corresponding to each type of resource.

These graphs plot data over a selected time period, usually set to the last 24 hours by default but adjustable to longer periods for more extended analysis.

Spotting Trends

Consistency vs. Spikes: Regular, consistent patterns in resource usage can indicate normal operation. Sudden spikes or drops, however, might suggest unusual activity or changes in website demand. For instance, a spike in CPU usage might coincide with a marketing campaign that drove increased traffic to your site.
Resource Limits: The graphs show your usage against preset limits (depicted as the red line across the graph). Consistently operating near or at these limits can indicate that your current hosting plan is not sufficient or your website(s) needs optimisation, especially if accompanied by faults.
Fault Occurrences: Alongside the resource usage lines, faults are also marked on the graphs with markers. Repeated faults in specific resources can signal that those resources are regularly being overtaxed, pointing to areas where optimisations may be needed or suggesting a potential upgrade to accommodate your website’s needs.

Practical Applications

Performance Diagnostics: If your website experiences slow loading times or downtime, the graphs can help pinpoint whether these issues correlate with resource limit hits. For example, if your site becomes slow when the I/O or CPU graph peaks at the limit, it’s likely that resource constraints are impacting performance.
Capacity Planning: By observing trends over time, you can predict when you might need more resources. If each month shows a rising trend in resource usage close to your limits, it’s prudent to consider upgrading before these limits become a bottleneck.
Optimisation Verification: After making optimisations to your site, such as implementing caching, the graphs can validate the impact of these changes. Improved resource usage patterns or reduced faults after changes indicate successful optimisations.

What to Be Concerned About

Regular Faults: Frequent faults across any resource type are a red flag. Regularly hitting resource limits can degrade user experience and affect website performance negatively.
High Resource Usage in Off-Peak Times: If the graphs show high resource usage during what should be off-peak hours for your website, it might indicate background tasks consuming resources (like backups or automated scripts) or possibly malicious activity such as a brute force attack.
Resource Saturation: If any resource usage is consistently maxed out, it’s crucial to address this immediately. Consistent maxing out can lead to severe performance issues and potential downtime.

Detailed Breakdown of the Usage Table

Below the resource usage graphs in cPanel, you'll find a detailed table that provides a comprehensive breakdown of your website's resource usage over specified intervals. Here's how to interpret and utilise this table effectively:

From/To: These columns show the time period for each row of data, typically one hour, giving you a clear indication of when the data was recorded.
Columns for Each Resource Type: Each resource monitored by CloudLinux (CPU, Memory, IO, Entry Processes, Number of Processes, IOPS) is represented in multiple sub-columns:
- A (Actual Usage): Displays the actual usage amount or percentage for the resource during the hour.
- L (Limit): Shows the limit set for that particular resource according to your hosting plan.
- F (Faults): Indicates the number of times the usage of this resource has exceeded the set limit during the hour. A fault is recorded whenever the actual usage surpasses the threshold defined in the 'L' column.

You can sort this table by any column, such as faults, to quickly identify when and where the most significant overages occurred. Sorting by faults can be particularly useful to pinpoint critical hours where resource limits were frequently exceeded.

Evaluating Faults in Resource Usage

When you check your website’s resource usage and see a few faults here and there, it’s usually not a cause for major concern. These faults occur because sometimes your website momentarily demands more than what its current resources allow—like during a sudden surge of visitors or while running a resource-heavy script.

However, if you start seeing faults regularly, especially more than ten in within an hour, that’s when you should be concerned. Persistent faults can slow down your website, frustrate your visitors, and depending on the type of fault, may even lead to errors. Such patterns suggest your website might be growing and it’s time to consider either optimising your current setup or upgrading to a hosting plan with more robust resources.

Understanding Historical Faults

To gain a comprehensive understanding of your resource usage over time, it's crucial to examine historical data. This can help you identify recurring patterns or spikes in resource consumption that might not be apparent from just a day's worth of data.

Adjusting the Timeframe

Accessing Timeframe Options: At the top of the graphs you'll find a dropdown menu labeled 'Timeframe'. This menu allows you to select different periods for which you want to review resource usage data. You can select from one of the pre-set options, or specify a precise time range.

Selecting a Time Unit: Adjacent to the 'Timeframe' dropdown is the 'Time Unit' dropdown. This allows you to specify the granularity of the data:

Day
Hour
Minute

Adjusting the time unit is particularly useful when dealing with longer time frames. For example, if you're reviewing a couple of weeks' worth of data, selecting a daily time unit can simplify the data presentation and reduce the time it takes for data to load. Conversely if you’re looking at a few hours, you may get more detail by adjusting the time unit to be in minutes.

Practical Usage of Extended Historical Data

By reviewing data from a longer period, you can detect whether high resource usage is an occasional spike or a regular occurrence. This is essential for understanding the overall performance and stability of your website.

If you notice regular peaks in resource usage that correlate with specific events or times, you may need to consider optimising your website or upgrading your hosting plan.

Look for Patterns: Identify times when resource use is at its peak. Are there specific days or hours when your site experiences more traffic or processes more data? Are there any trends?
Compare with Website Activities: Align spikes in resource usage with your website activities. For example, if you notice a surge in CPU and RAM usage after deploying a new plugin or theme, it might be poorly optimised.

Snapshots Tab

The "Snapshots" tab provides a more detailed look at your website’s resource usage at specific points in time. Specifically, a snapshot is recorded whenever your website experienced a fault on any metric, helping you understand what was happening on your account when resource limits are reached.

This tab is divided into three subtabs—Processes, HTTP Queries, and MySQL Queries—each providing insights into different aspects of your website's functioning.

Subtabs Overview:

Processes: This subtab displays a list of all active processes at the time of the snapshot. It includes the Process ID (PID), the command line (CMD) that was running, and how much CPU and Memory (MEM) each process used. While this gives a good overview of what scripts were executing, it may not pinpoint where bottlenecks occur, especially as many applications may be routed through a single file like index.php.
HTTP Queries: For more granularity, especially in understanding the web requests that were being processed at the time, the HTTP Queries subtab can provide more context than the Processes tab. It shows which specific URLs were accessed, which could help trace the source of high resource usage more directly.
MySQL Queries: This subtab is crucial for identifying database-related performance issues. It lists all SQL queries running at the time of the snapshot, which can be particularly useful for spotting inefficient queries that may be slowing down your website.

You may find several snapshots are taken around the time you had faults, particularly if faults occurred over a long time range. It’s advisable to review several snapshots before and after the reported issue time to get a comprehensive view of what was happening.

You can select snapshots by date and time using dropdown menus at the top of the tab. This allows you to pinpoint when specific issues occurred and examine the detailed state of your server at those moments.

The times displayed in the snapshots align with your local browser time, making it easier to correlate events with your local observations or reported issues.

Addressing Resource Limits with Resource Boost

If you're regularly encountering faults or hitting the resource limits of your hosting plan, the Resource Boost feature can provide an immediate solution to alleviate these pressures. This tool acts like a quick fix, giving your website a temporary boost in resources.

Resource Boost is akin to having a turbo button for your server that you can press when you need a quick surge in resources. It's designed to provide a temporary boost, helping to cope with unexpected increases in web traffic or intensive processes that demand more power than usual.

How Resource Boost Can Help:

Immediate Relief: When you’ve identified that your account is reaching its resource limits, activating Resource Boost can immediately increase your server's processing power, helping to maintain site performance and user experience.
Support for Site Optimisation: While the boost is active, you have a window with increased resources to perform necessary optimisations or adjustments to your website
Temporary Solution Before Upgrading: Resource Boost can serve as a temporary measure while you evaluate the need for a more permanent solution, such as upgrading to a higher-tier hosting plan that better fits your growing needs.

Resource Boosts provide you with on-demand additional resources, however, it's important to note that while it increases your account capabilities, it may not completely alleviate all issues if the demand far exceeds the available boost.

While Resource Boost is an effective short-term solution, it’s crucial to consider it as part of a broader strategy. It provides necessary breathing room, but assessing your long-term resource needs and planning for a potential hosting plan upgrade or extensive site optimisation will ensure your website can continue to grow and perform at its best.

Overview of Common Optimisation Techniques

Optimisation Technique	Description	Impact on Resource Usage
Turning on OpCache	Caches compiled PHP code to improve PHP execution times.	Reduces the need for PHP to compile scripts on each request, decreasing CPU usage.
Update PHP Version	Upgrading to the latest PHP version for enhanced performance.	Newer PHP versions often come with performance improvements and optimisations, reducing execution time and memory usage.
LiteSpeed Cache	Server-level caching for websites on LiteSpeed servers.	Significantly reduces the load on PHP processes by serving cached pages instead of dynamic generation. Requires LiteSpeed compatible application.
General Page Caching	Caching pages to reduce the number of times they are dynamically generated.	Where an application isn’t compatible with LiteSpeed Cache, another caching solution may exist to decrease PHP load.
Redis/Memcached	In-memory data stores for caching objects.	Reduces database load by storing data in memory for fast retrieval, which can help decrease the load on PHP processes. Can often be used alongside page caching (i.e. WordPress, Magento)
MySQL Optimization	Includes conversions to efficient table storage engines like InnoDB.	Improves database query efficiency, which can significantly reduce PHP execution times and database load.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)	Distributes content delivery to reduce load on the origin server.	While mostly impacting bandwidth and user latency, it can reduce server load by handling static content delivery and minimising activity from bots.
System Cron Jobs for WP	Replacing WP-Cron with actual system cron jobs.	Helps minimise complex PHP processes from running background tasks on page load (like taking backups).
WP Admin Ajax Optimizations	Optimising the usage of admin-ajax.php in WordPress.	Reduces unnecessary PHP loads by optimizing or reducing the use of AJAX requests that can otherwise lead to high PHP process usage.
Handling 404 Errors Efficiently	Reducing the impact of dynamically generated 404 pages for missing files.	Prevents the server from spawning excessive PHP processes for missing assets, which can otherwise create high CPU and memory load.
Reduce Plugins	Eliminate unnecessary or resource-heavy plugins.	Reduces the complexity of PHP executions and may reduces database queries, which can improve response times and efficiency.
Improve Inefficient Code	Review and optimise inefficient code patterns.	Enhances application performance by streamlining operations, reducing CPU and memory usage, and potentially decreasing I/O operations.