Forge + DO server = High CPU

Are you getting a lot of traffic? The logs might help - try tail -fing the files in /var/log/nginx/ to see what's happening.

Not at all, talking about 50 people on at once. Thanks for tip, giving it a go now.

Maybe also tail your laravel log in storage/logs and see what it's saying.

try sudo -s before...to get admin rights for accessing log file

Seeing a lot of these types of errors in nginx log:

2015/09/22 20:35:57 [error] 1319#0: *5366 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Deprecated: Automatically populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. To avoid this warning set 'always_populate_raw_post_data' to '-1' in php.ini and use the php://input stream instead. in Unknown on line 0" while reading response header from upstream, client: 111.111.11.11, server: hegartymaths.net, request: "POST /skill/related-calculations-1/assessment HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock:", host: "hegartymaths.net", referrer: "http://hegartymaths.net/related-calculations-1"

Could this have something to do with it?

That's just a deprecated message. Nothing related but in some weird way it could well be :P

Disable that via php.ini always_populate_raw_post_data to -1

Look into php5-fpm logs to see any obvious issues. If you don't see anything, can you post your www.conf setup as it could be spawning too many child processes and thus using a lot of CPU %. You're also using 5.00 load so unless it's a powerful CPU, you will be eating into CPU time there :P

hint: use htop instead of top

Hey @bashy thanks for the reply. I've disabled that via the method you mentioned, however doesn't seem to have fixed it. Something's definitely up big time behind the scenes - We're know on the $640 p/month (yes 6-4-0) and it's still ridiculously slow.

Here are my conf files: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/dd17b1b96347a16178f0

Thanks again.

Okay thanks for that. You will need to check your php5-fpm settings though. Normally if php5-fpm is under stress, it will show you in the php5-fpm.log files about child processes running out.