Amazon EC2 Server CPU 100%

I signed up for the free year using the Amazon EC2 micro instance.  I was pretty excited to move off of my home server.  As mentioned in previous posts.  Unfortunately as mentioned by other posts, it doesn’t take much to bring down your system.  I currently have hosted a few WordPress blogs on this server and as soon as it is crawled by Google, Bing, or others it immediately goes up to 100 percent cpu usage and then is stuck there until I can manually reboot it.

Here are a few attempts at fixing the problem which I have done so far in order to prevent these spikes:

  • Added WC Super Cache.  The goal is to take weight off the database hits by providing a HTML cached version of the page.  When the website gets crawled it will be able to serve the pages quickly and also not max out the CPU usage.
  • Signed up for CloudFlare.  This does caching as well and blocks potential threats to your website.
  • Tune Apache.  Here are set of recommended choices from someone:

StartServers 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
MaxClients 20
MaxRequestsPerChild 5000

  •  I am sure the list will go on and on.  I might try monit but haven’t yet.
  • UPDATE:  Another link for this situation.