What Happens When You Hit a Resource Limit - DigitalFyre Knowledge Base

When your account reaches a CloudLinux resource limit, requests to your site are throttled or temporarily rejected until resource usage drops back within the allowed range.

What You or Your Visitors May See

Symptom	Likely Cause
Site loads slowly or times out	CPU or Entry Process limit reached
`503 Service Unavailable` error	Entry Process or PHP process limit reached
Database queries running slowly	I/O or IOPS limit reached
PHP scripts failing silently	RAM limit reached

What to Do

Check your resource usage first — see Viewing Your Resource Usage to confirm a limit is being hit and identify which resource is the cause. Common causes and remedies:

High Entry Processes — often caused by slow PHP scripts or a traffic spike. Optimise slow queries or enable PHP opcode caching if not already active.
High CPU — a runaway plugin, poorly written script, or bot traffic can spike CPU usage. Review your error logs — see Checking Error Logs.
High I/O — frequent disk-intensive operations such as log writing or large file handling. Reduce unnecessary disk writes where possible.

Limits reset automatically as resource usage subsides. There is no need to contact support for a temporary spike — but if you are hitting limits regularly, it may be time to upgrade your plan.