Website creates GBs of data from out of nowhere :/

lvnt 2019-02-13 12:54:01 UTC #1

Keywords: WordPress Multisite - AWS - How to - Other
Description:
Hi

My installation is a Bitnami WP Multisite stack on AWS...

My website got totally unresponsible to web browsers. -I was able to connect to it with Putty and FTP while the website was down to browsers.

What happened;
- First, Pingdom sent me an alert that "website was unreachable for 30 minutes"
- I tried to connect to the website with a browser and Cloudflare returned a "504 socket error" (10 minutes after that it changed to "500 timeout" error")
- I sent a simple ping, approved that server was responsive
- I logged in to my BCH account and saw that CPU&RAM were operating within avarage usage, but disk was gone to 100% !

Things I've tried;
- Cursed to my luck
- Restarting the server didn't help
- I leveraged my disk space to surpress the pressure. Only after this action website became available to browsers again
- I checked number of attacks to the website but appearently there was no hacker attack.
- I suspected that a(few) plugins might cause this situation and tried activate&deactivate the ones that I suspect.
I happen to think that some kind of "loop" never flushed its cache and created LOTS OF DATA (more than 7 GB and still adding) FYI I'm not using any spesific cache plugin -ie. Cache Enabler or WP Super Cache etc

I think my problem is still going on because website added another 1GB to itself for the last 8 hours(I had to stop monitoring and sleep right?

Please I need your advice!..

How can I quickly find out which directory is consuming how much GBs, so I can ditch my own scar -there are so many directories I almost get lost among them
In order to be more proactive in the future, what problems generaly cause such an issue?

gongomgra 2019-02-14 11:06:24 UTC #2

Hi @lvnt,

Another user faced a similiar issue recently. It could be related to the MySQL binlogs files. Could you please check the thread linked below?

Hope it helps,
Gonzalo

lvnt 2019-02-14 19:09:39 UTC #3

Thanks for the quick aid.. I’ll definitely check the link you’ve suggested thank you. Actually I’m not sure if it’s relevant but I suspect a plugin named http/https Remover plugin somehow keeps a cache and can’t un-load it did you heard something like this before

gongomgra 2019-02-15 10:58:25 UTC #4

Hi @lvnt,

Let us know if the binlogs expiration setting works for you!

I'm afraid I haven't heard about that plugin. In that case, I think you should ask the plugins developers as they can give you better help than we can with this specific question related to their product. Please find below the link to the plugin page at wordpress.org. You can ask your question under the "Support" tab

Hope it helps,
Gonzalo

lvnt 2019-02-15 21:23:23 UTC #5

@gongomgra my suspected criminal is a plugin. I'm turning them on and off one by one instead of re-deploying another multisite. I trust your multisite stack(therefore Bitnami) that it works fine
..but also feel like something got in between your stack and my visitors and made the website(s) unreachable

Today, to me, a bin log is a kind of thing that I should learn it do do it but I'm on it as well. Hope I solve this and anyone having the same problem finds his/hers cure in this post

fyi I've found where bin logs lay and am on it to see if I'll find GBs of data in there. Wish me luck

gongomgra 2019-02-18 11:19:29 UTC #6

Hi @lvnt,

Have you tried the solution mentioned in the thread I linked before? You can run the commands below to check the size of the /opt/bitnami/mysql/data folder and the size of the files inside

du -sh /opt/bitnami/mysql/data
ls -larth /opt/bitnami/mysql/data

If you want to specifically check the size of the binlogs files only, you can run

ls -larth /opt/bitnami/mysql/data/binlog*

Apart from that, please let us know if you find anything related to plugins.

Regards,
Gonzalo

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