My Question: where can i find what is causing the PHP socket connection limit to be reached on my website? Account statistics in vista panel don’t seem to show this.
My website was temporarily suspended today, for reaching PHP socket connection limit. I submitted a ticket and the website is back up now. Here is the email I received from infinityfree:
Your website was closed due to reaching the PHP socket connection limit.
Please reduce the amount of PHP socket connections your applications makes to ensure it is not suspended again for the same reason
Premium Hosting has unlimited PHP sockets, disk space and unlimited daily hits.
Other Information
I have 7 active plugins. Could one of them be causing the high number of PHP socket connections? maybe broken link checker which checks each link on my site if it’s broken or not? I’ve been using these same plugins for more than 6 months now. and this is the first time this issue came up.
All in One SEO
Broken Link Checker
Converter for Media
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Post Views Counter
WP 2FA - Two-factor authentication for WordPress
WP Mail SMTP
We don’t share any metrics for the PHP socket connections used. I’m not even sure if that metric is stored in any way where it might be useful to troubleshooting it. I highly doubt if it actually records where that connection is being made to, or what kind of connection is being done.
The broken link checker could indeed be the reason, but so could the Converter for Media if it uses third party services to do the image conversion. WP Mail SMTP could also be the reason if you try sending an excessive amount of email.
But the reality is that there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut obvious reason in the list of plugins you shared to explain the high socket usage issue.
the email said I reached the PHP socket connection limit. but it did not specify the timeframe or even what the limit number is (10,000 ?). was it a daily or a monthly limit? that might help a little if that info exists. just wondering if it’s a huge daily spike that caused it, or just an increased daily activity in aggregate exceeded monthly limit.
my guess is it’s not smtp, since i only have it setup to comment replies and admin emails. i get weekly email summary, and it only shows 1 to 2 emails.
the converter for media, only converts after i post. so everything has already been converted for all my posts in the last 12 months, and this past month had the least activity, so, it’s probably not the converter plugin either.
so that just leaves broken link checker. every time i add a new post, that has a link, so the number of links grows with new posts.
i finally found the settings in the broken link checker. looks like it scans 4,908 website urls every 72 hours. i wonder if this is it?
Detected 4908 unique URLs in 5908 links.
check each link every 72 hours
i went ahead and changed it to scan every 168 hours (once a week)
I don’t know that information, and I’m not even sure if that information is supposed to be public. After all, we don’t want spammers to tune their abuse so they can stay just below that limit so they can keep spamming without being caught.