Probable causes of high load:

1. Load from real users. More users are visiting website and have bigger server load. This may be due to
   • Advertising
   • Sales
   • Miscellaneous
2. Load from malicious traffic. Should be stopped.
   • Brute-force attacks to login page of websites, such as wp-login.php, /administrator/index.php, /xmlrpc.php, etc
   • Spam bots posting comments to forum, board, forms etc
   • Other malicious activities

Identifying the sources of high load

1. Check Apache’s server-status page.
2. Check MySQL: SHOW PROCESSLIST. shows which threads are running.
3. Check Server logs. For NGINX /var/log/nginx/ , for Apache /var/log/httpd/ , also check domains/ folder.
4. Check PHP-FPM status page.

Possible solutions

• Enable Brute-Force monitor
• Optimize PHP-FPM, MySQL, Apache/Nginx
• Protect/limit access to login pages
• Enable reCaptcha, etc.
• Add your site to CloudFlare