One of our clients was having serious load issues on their Joomla website during peak hours. At first, we thought it was MySQL – but further investigation revealed another, more subtle culprit: it was clamd, yes, the seemingly innocent virus scanner, was the root cause of the problem. To make a long story short (is it too late?), what was happening was that every time the cache was cleared (which was a frequent operation when the team adding content to the site was active), clamd was checking all the recreated cached files over and over again. This was causing clamd to hijack the processing power for itself, thus causing other, even more critical processes such as Apache and MySQL to starve.
So, how did we solve the problem?
Luckily, clamd allowed, in its configuration file, to skip directories from being scanned. So, we opened the file clamd.conf which is located under the /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/etc/ folder (this is a WHM environment) and we added the following line to it:
OnAccessExcludePath /home/[cpanel-user]/public_html/cache
We then saved the file and restarted the clamd service from WHM. Once we did that, the load dropped substantially and the website was healthy again! Hooray!
If you are experiencing load issues on the server powering your Joomla website, then check your top processes (using the top -d 1 shell command). If you notice that clamd is always at a 100%, then try the above solution and it should resolve the problem. If it doesn’t work for you, or if you still need help, then please contact us. We are always read to help, our work is always clean, and our prices are always right!