Hi everyone, we’re trying to troubleshoot the issues our Discourse installation has been having in the last few days. We’re running a Contabo cloud vps, 8 cores/32gb/nvme, for a userbase of ~150 people; we’ve had few issues in the last 2 and a half years. Since last weekend, the instance is having…

[image] char: This is definitely a memory issue: I’m seeing some huge queries here. Have you rebooted recently? It looks like there are a bunch of idle postgres processes eating a bunch of memory, I think. How much memory did you give postgres in your app.yml? Did you change the defaults? A…

[image] char: This is definitely a memory issue: I’m seeing some huge queries here. [image] pfaffman: It looks like there are a bunch of idle postgres processes eating a bunch of memory, I think. This doesn’t look like a memory problem to me - there’s only around 6GB taken up by applic…

The kernel swapd has racked up quite a bit of time. It’s quite possible the paging activity wasn’t captured by the short vmstat run. There seem to me to be a lot of postgres processes using more or less 20% of RAM. Too many processes given the available RAM?? Checking the postgresql config would b…

[image] Ed_S: there must be some sharing which isn’t visible Discourse forks after initialisation to benefit from sharing as much as it can, yes.

The situation has improved. We were on 3.6.0, Postgres 13 was working without evident issues - so far. We posticipated the upgrade to 15 because we didn’t have enough free space on the vps, we needed 150GB given our database size. We pruned what we considered useless data - tracking data and sear…

Another update, after a few days of normal usage. [image] After the initial spike - I wonder what was going on and I was afraid we wouldn’t have been any closer to a solution - something worked. We don’t know if it was data pruning, updating to PSQL15 …

Hi again, I’m updating the thread because something unusual happened, and I’d like some pointers in how to understand what’s going on and how to fix these situations. As I said everything was going smoothly in the last few days. Then something happens. [image] …

From my experience, this kind of CPU behavior is more likely caused by a server infection or security issue, rather than Discourse itself. I’ve run into a similar situation before, and replacing the server eventually solved the problem.

In my opinion, migration is probably necessary. You could set up a new server and install Discourse to test it—if everything runs normally, there’s a high chance the issue is caused by a server infection or security problem. Also, may I ask whether this server has been regularly updated? Has it bee…

This wasn’t in my bingo card, to be honest. We’re on Ubuntu Server 22, there are some minor updates to do, it won’t hurt to force an upgrade now anyway. Let’s see what happens.

Unusually high CPU usage

Support Self-hosting

supermathie (Michael Brown) February 2, 2026, 4:23pm 12

There were probably background jobs running in sidekiq that needed to complete.

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Unusually high CPU usage

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