Strange, random performance issues on our Forum

Hey folks, hoping to get some assistance here - as a mere amateur, I’m encountering issues with our Discourse setup over on XboxEra.com - (https://forum.xboxera.com)

It’s running on a Digital Ocean server - 4 GB Memory / 2 Intel vCPUs / 80 GB Disk

We have over 2000 members, and obviously not all of them are ever on at once. At random points in the day, we see the forums become sluggish and unresponsive, with CPU usage shooting up to 60% user side, and a huge jump in outbound bandwidth.

The forum displays the “some features have been disabled” message automatically, with comments taking up to a minute to save, and users even being logged out.

I’ve checked Google Adsense and analytics to check for issues or errors, and can see nothing that stands out. However, I’m admittedly not an expert - anyone have any bright ideas?

Thanks in advance!

I can’t seem to determine why - has anyone encountered an issue like this before?

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That network IO going up while disk IO goes down is interesting.

Any bad bots standing out in the Admin > Reports > Web Crawler User Agents report?

Here’s our top 10.

Are you having digital ocean run backups of your droplet?

Yeah, it backs up once a week, but it’s regular and known. No back up occurred today for example, but we experienced huge perf issues regardless.

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