Excessive bandwidth usage on VirtueMart site – 102GB per month

[ThijsE6]

Hi everyone,

I'm running a Joomla website with VirtueMart, and I've noticed an unusually high bandwidth usage — around 102GB per month, which seems excessive considering the number of visitors is relatively low.

I'm trying to identify what's causing this. The site doesn't have large images or videos, and I've already optimized most assets. Still, the traffic seems to consume a lot of data.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with VirtueMart, such as:

High data transfer from product or category pages?

Repeated AJAX or background requests?

Issues with image caching or dynamic image generation?

Any ideas on where to look or how to reduce the bandwidth load would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Thijs

[jflash]

I had a similar problem, but in addition to that, the site was frequently crashing with an Error 500. After examining the logs, I discovered that an aggressive bot was operating on the site, and I had no other choice but to block it in the .htaccess file.

[PRO]

I use akeeba admin tools to create my htaccess file.
They add lots of blocked bots to the list.

[NorrNext]

It is hard to make a conclusion without details. Maybe the site got DDOS.

ThijsE6, do you have additional information concerning the anonymous bandwidth usage? It is interesting to know this case.

[ThijsE6]

Hi, thanks for your replies.

A couple of weeks ago, I installed Akeeba Admin Tools, and things seemed to improve a bit. The site was still quite slow, but the bandwidth usage dropped significantly. However, the website is still very slow, and sometimes it's even completely unreachable.

This website is a webshop that sells caps. The database contains a lot of unused images from old products, which I plan to delete soon to free up space.

At first, it seemed like Akeeba Admin Tools was helping, but unfortunately, the site is still using about 1.4 GB of bandwidth per day, which is way too much and definitely not normal.

To come back to NorrNext's question — what kind of details would you like to know?
I don't have much insight into what exactly is using up the bandwidth, other than that it's being consumed by Apache.

The website in question is: https://www.beterpet.nl

Thanks in advance!

[iWim]

PageSpeed was not able to test performance on your site.
YellowLab was and it found several issues you may want to look at...

To see if it's related to your template:
- Disable JCHOptimize (clear cache afterwards)
- Set Cassiopeia as default template

Post the results from the Forum Post Assistent:
It's used on the Joomla Forum, it may work here too.
https://forumpostassistant.github.io/docs/