If you notice that your website loading time is increasing, it may indicate an overload. A website becomes overloaded when the usage of the hosting resources exceeds reasonable limits. You can find the cause of website overload in cPanel by following these easy steps:
Step 1 - Access Resource Usage
Log into your cPanel account, head to the Metrics section, and click on Resource Usage:
You can also find this menu by typing it in the search bar. The Resource Usage Dashboard will show the status of your hosting resources as follows:
Your site had no issues in the past 24 hours - your website is optimized and not overloaded
Your site has been limited within the past 24 hours - this indicates that your website is overloaded. You can also see which types of resources exceed the resource limits
Your site might hit resource limits soon - the resource limits for your plan have been reached, and your website will be overloaded. cPanel will also show the resource type that has exceeded the limits
Step 2 - Check Resource Usage Details
You can find the cause of excessive usage by clicking on the Details button or by navigating to the Current Usage tab. It will show the details of each type of resource, such as memory, CPU, inodes, and input/output:
The graphs will show resource usage of the day per hour by default. If you wish to change these settings, click on the Timeframe and Time Unit drop-down menu to select a different option, eg. change the time unit to minutes:
Step 3 - Check the Snapshots
You can also find the cause of website overload by clicking the Snapshot tab, where the processes for the selected timeframe will be listed, as in the following example:
There are four columns displayed in the process list, as follows:
PID - process ID
CMD - process name
CPU - CPU usage
MEM - the amount of memory used
In the example above, the process script.php exceeds the capacity of CPU usage as it reached 103%. This indicates that there is an issue with the script that slows down the CPU performance.
To check website overload issues at a different date, click on the date selector and, if available, on Choose snapshot to select a different time.
You can also click on the Database Queries and HTTP Queries tabs to find possible issues on database and HTTP processes:
