Hello DigitalOcean Support Team,
I am experiencing intermittent issues with one of my droplets hosting a WordPress website, where the system enters an unresponsive state and requires a manual reboot in order to function normally again.
Context:
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Droplet is used solely to host a WordPress website
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From time to time, I observe sudden spikes in CPU (100%) and memory usage
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After these spikes, the system becomes unresponsive (site becomes inaccessible)
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A reboot always restores normal operation
I have already increased the droplet resources once, but I do not believe this is a capacity issue. Under normal conditions, the droplet rarely (if never) exceeds 50% of the allocated CPU and memory.
Request for assistance: I would appreciate your help with:
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Checking whether there are infrastructure-level issues (host node, disk I/O, network, etc.)
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Advising how to better diagnose the root cause of these spikes and freezes
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Recommending monitoring or configuration changes to prevent the system from reaching this unresponsive state
If needed, I can provide:
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Droplet ID (I have only one)
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Approximate timestamps of the incidents (latest was just other day)
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Monitoring screenshots or logs
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
Best regards, Aleksandar Petrov
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Hi there,
This usually ends up being something inside the Droplet rather than a platform issue, especially if a reboot always brings things back to normal.
In my experience, sudden 100% CPU or memory spikes on WordPress are often caused by traffic bursts, bots, or a plugin/theme doing something expensive.
Even if average usage looks low, short spikes can still push the system into a bad state. I’d start by checking logs around the time it happens, especially system logs and your web server / PHP-FPM logs.
If the Droplet is completely unresponsive and you can’t SSH in, the Recovery Console is really handy. You can log in as root and inspect logs, disk usage, or services even when the Droplet looks “dead” from the outside. https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/recovery/recovery-console/
One common thing I’ve seen is missing or very small swap. Without swap, a short memory spike can cause the system to lock up or start killing processes. Adding a bit of swap often helps stabilize things. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-20-04
I’d also enable DigitalOcean Monitoring and set a couple of alerts. That way you can correlate CPU, memory, and disk I/O spikes with exact timestamps in your logs. https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/monitoring/
On the WordPress side, caching makes a big difference. Page caching and limiting heavy admin-ajax usage usually reduce sudden load. If traffic or bots are involved, putting something like Cloudflare in front of the site can help absorb spikes.
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