Physical memory usage issues with WordPress plugins

Question

Occasionally, my website that's hosted with GoDaddy is crashing due to physical memory overload. My host told me that PHP processes are overloading the server, and to try to find out which WordPress plugin is responsible for this, but when I run top, I only get this:

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
9204  thisusr   38  18  287m  68m  40m S  0.0  0.2   0:43.58 php
11175 thisusr   38  18  286m  66m  40m S  0.0  0.2   0:37.86 php
13536 thisusr   38  18  279m  60m  40m S  0.0  0.2   0:21.61 php
14091 thisusr   38  18  284m  66m  40m S  0.0  0.2   0:18.29 php
14285 thisusr   20   0  136m 1456  668 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 pure-ftpd
15101 thisusr   20   0  135m 1500  704 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.04 pure-ftpd
17461 thisusr   20   0 98956  15m 2712 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpsrvd-ssl
17466 thisusr   20   0 99092  15m 2712 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cpsrvd-ssl
17745 thisusr   20   0 14908 1132  944 R  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 top
18979 thisusr   20   0  104m 1984 1004 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.35 sshd
18983 thisusr   20   0 11508 1332 1100 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.04 bash

How do I find which WordPress plugin maps to each process with "php" as the command?

Answer 1

Actually, there is a way to tell which plugins may be the problem. The P3 plugin (ironically, written by GoDaddy) can be used to generate a report of what each plugin is doing in terms of runtime. Longer run times will usually correlate with more resources consumed and give you some initial guidance on which plugins to examine first.

Edit 2020:

So the P3 Profiler plugin might be dead. There is a new Health Check plugin from Automattic that should do an adequate job of replacing P3 and if you have shell access to your server/site, you can also use the WordPress Command Line Interface (wp cli) and run wp doctor check --all for more complete checks.

Answer 2

Now a days Godaddy allows us to buy a higher physical Resource Level. Buy 1024 and use less plugins, I had same issue with my site but I used fewer plugins and bought 1024 (Resource Level 2). Now my site is running well with 10k visitors daily.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, with WordPress you will not be able to know which plugin is consuming resources. You will have to disable the plugins one by one and then try. You can even optimize the database so that it does not consumes much resources.

It may be helpful to indicate which hosting plan you have with GoDaddy.