Wordpress on IIS: High CPU Usage

Question

we're using WP 4.0 on IIS 7, and experience high cpu usage: regularly spikes up to 25% for a single process (php-cgi.exe) in a pool (w3wp.exe), which will sometimes summ up over 3 or more processes to > 60% (as can be seen by sysinternals process explorer). I already checked that FastCgi is active and even installed wincache for php - which helped a bit. And Also I deaktivated all the plug-ins - which also only brought a minor improvement.

Our System:

• 3 intel Xeon CPU 3.7 Ghz
• 12 GB Ram
• WP 4.0
• Microsoft IIS 7
• PHP Version : 5.3.23 / 32Bit OS
• Memory limit : 128 MB
• Memory usage : 21.65 MB

Any ideas what can be done about this? Change some settings for FastCgi or Wincache? Do we need better hardware?

your's Felix

Answer 1

Is this a production server? I could only guess... More information is needed than just pointing the resources you have. I'll give you some points to start.

Seems like you have plenty of memory and CPU resources. Your hardware is ROCK SOLID and you don't need a better hardware! But! One big problem I see is the OS (in my opinion). Is there anything else going on that machine?

Are you converting photos, doing some CPU intensive operations within the WP installation? Any image optimizers? Are you displaying/resizing any images? Try disabling all of the plugins you have and the caching as well - plugins or server side. Another thing to try is changing your theme to one of the default ones. How many page hits do you have?

Try setting the Max Instances setting, under IIS Server --> FastCGI Settings, to 1.

Try to trace which certain requests are causing the php-cgi.exe go rogue and hog the CPU.

And after all I would recommend running Wordpress on a linux machine with NGINX and if possible Lighttpd for serving the static content, if you're not comfortable with both try running Apache 2.4 with MySQL 5.5. Install Oracle VM Virtualbox for example and run a Debian OS or whatever you feel comfortable with and see, if you have the same issue. If the Windows OS is not needed for anything else (which we don't know yet), if possible switch to a favorable Linux.