What is the reason behind I/O high usages

Mainly the I/O is induced by higher data output and input, or you might claim higher read speed and write speed in the disc. If you are the owner of a VPS or Dedicated server and when you create a ZIP file from the 20 files, and each file has 10 GB, it will take a lot of time and therefore increase the use of I/O.

1. Malware

If malware affects your WordPress site, make sure to clean it up because hackers may try to slow down your website by can your website’s load. You can separately take a backup of your plugins and theme folder and search them at Virus Complete website. If you search, you will find the result which plugin causes this issue so that it is cleaned one by one, or else we would recommend that you avoid using that plugin or theme. DoS attacks, spam attacks, poorly built PHP scripts often consume large amounts of memory and this makes sense for high I / O use within your control panel.

2. Backup Plugins

Some backup plugins produce the backup for you but who knows that in the meantime you are doing the input/output of your data to read and write the data on your hard drive or HDD. If the total data size of your website is too high then you will note that the backup plugin takes too much time to render the backup and that your I/O use is too high and you will find I/O once it is complete.

3. Crawler

If your I/O usage limit is 400 KBPS and you receive more than 400 visitors or if Crawler accesses your pages at a speed of 400 KBPS, your website will display high I/O usage, so either your website will serve the pages or your website will write the data, both will include in the I/O usage. As web spiders that crawl sites too aggressively so there is the chance of increasing the I/O usage of your Cpanel account and results in website slow down.

4. PHP Script

Most Linux servers run Apache web servers in today’s shared hosting environment. Most of those supporting CGI and FastCGI scripts and the most popular one is SuPhp – written in a variety of languages, including Perl, Python, and the most popular, PHP. All CPU, IO, memory resources or Apache processes can theoretically be consumed by a single site and this will bring the server to a complete grinding halt.

5. wp-cron.php File

If you look inside your file manager you can find the file wp-cron.php that is involved in running your automatic task, make sure the file is not infected. Since the plugin’s task is scheduled to run, there is a chance to run the short PHP file to execute the task and increase memory use and I/O use. So you can use a plugin named WP Control to monitor and manage cron actions. If your WordPress does not run on any automated task then it is best to disable access to cron file by changing the file permission to 0000

To fix the high I/O usages, follow these steps

There were several ways you can minimize the high I/O usage and make your website run faster so I will go straight to the solution by highlighting the detailed steps by which you can completely reduce the high I/O usage issue for your WordPress website.

1. Install caching plugin

As our WordPress website runs over PHP and it takes high memory and CPU usage as it serves the PHP files so if we cache the files and convert it to HTML files and serve it to the users then the load of the website will be minimized hence it will reduce the load. You can use several WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache and Wp Super Cache, Comet Cache, WP Fastest Cache also WP Rocket plugin as a premium one.

2. Use a CDN

Sometimes huge crawler and BOT wants your website to be down hence they increase the crawl rate and continuously surf the pages of your website, this creates your website unreachable or HTTP 508 error so to block these bots or crawler I will suggest you use CDN like CloudFlare as one of my best choices.

3. Use trusted WordPress plugins and WordPress themes

Always remember that not paying for something which should be paid will lead you to pay more than what you have not paid. In short, if you have taken any premium plugin or theme from someone else who has nulled it or cracked it then remember that person also expecting something from you i.e either damage to your website or some kind of malfunctioning of your website. Nothing is free in this world so if you have taken any paid plugin or theme be sure to check it on Virus Total site so that the item is clean.

4. Use less plugin

Using too much plugin means too much load on your website as each visitors will be served by the plugin to perform the action so there will be a load on your server too. So better use the only required plugins and remove the rest also make sure do not use any automatic plugin like social poster or auto-schedule posts plugin. Use the Query Monitor plugin to see which plugin is creating the high load on your website and fix the load time by analyzing the result generated by the plugin.

In this article, we have seen how to fix WordPress high I/O usage.