Site: thecardinalnation.com
WordPress 6.4.3
bbPress 2.6.9
MySQL 7.4

Roughly weekly over the last six months, my entire WordPress site slows down to a stop with 504 errors experienced by users for 10-20 minutes at a time. CPU utilization on my dedicated server goes from 20% to close to 100%.

My hosting provider WPEngine suspects bbPress is spiking MySQL with long-running queries.

Here is what WPEngine Support told me in one of my exchanges with them.

“Most past mysql queries were generated by this file:
/nas/content/live/thecardinalnat/wp-content/plugins/bbpress/includes/common/widgets.php:1096

“Something about the query on line 1096 of that file is causing spikes in mysql usage.

“Bbpress support may be able to explain what the query is trying to do and how to optimize it or change some settings to make those requests less heavy for mysql.”

That is what has brought me here.

Does anyone know what this query does, if it could be involved with my problem and what corrective action should be taken? I would greatly appreciate any advice you can provide.

(I am the site owner and am not highly technical, but I have access to additional assistance as needed.)

[@robin-w Moderator 7 months, 2 weeks ago]

that line of code is related to the replies widget – as a test try disabling that widget and see if it makes a difference

[@domeboys Participant 7 months, 2 weeks ago]

Thank you for the reply, Robin. What functionality will I lose when disabling the replies widget? Will it stop all replies from being accepted, temporarily making the forums read only?

[@domeboys Participant 7 months, 2 weeks ago]

Upon reading further, I see mention of the “Recent Replies” widget. It apparently does not affect the functionality of bbPress and it is not that important to me, so I will disable it now. Thank you!

[@robin-w Moderator 7 months, 2 weeks ago]

great – hopefully that will fix, but I cannot see why that line of code
should be causing a problem.