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/

[jflash]

I put this lines to my .htaccess file after 'RewriteEngine On' and now no problems with bandwidth and error 500:

# Blocking bots
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (AhrefsBot|SemrushBot|MJ12bot|Baiduspider|YandexBot|Sogou|Exabot|facebot|ia_archiver|Slurp|DuckDuckBot) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

# Do not block Google AdsBo and Googlebot
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*bot.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !AdsBot-Google [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !AdsBot-Google-Mobile [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Googlebot [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

[iWim]

Many bots do respect robots.txt (at least on my site).
So you can block evil bots by adding the evil user-agents to your robots.txt

Code Select Expand

User-agent: evilBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: SomeOtherCrappyBot
Disallow: /
Bots that do not respect your robots.txt need to be blocked through .htaccess (see post by jflash).

Off topic @jflash:
You block DuckDuckGo?
DDG is a legitimate search engine and an excellent (privacy first) alternative to Google...

[NorrNext]

ThijsE6,
How do you get statistics of bandwidth usage? Are there any additional details? Which pages or scripts.
What is average daily website traffic by visitors?

The problem is complex and may appear due to different circumstances and maybe it is even not the problem with VirtueMart:

1. DDOS attack on domain (personally on your site) or on server. Do you have own server or shared hosting? It is important. Maybe other site on the same server gets attacked.
I attempted to open your site but it works very slowly (inappropriate for end users). If it happens on a regular basis, then the best way at the moment could be changing server.

2. The site needs an optimization.
The home page has 4,62 mb size. It is too big, especially for mobile devices!
Just calculate if you have 100 visitors per day and each of them loads just the 1st page, it takes 462 mb. of bandwidth.

3. Maybe the problem is in scripts of 3rd party extensions. A deep investigation is needed.
At your place I'd make copy of the site somewhere and play with it. Even on localhost. Maybe there is an old extension or bad written extension or just an unexpected situation. Also I'd recommend to have a look at SEARCH module. There is an Ajax call that works after typing 2nd letter in search field.
Just temporary disable it and compare.

By other words, it maybe not the issue related to VirtueMart. This case shows complex problems on the site resolving of them could improve the situation a lot.

[Kuubs]

Your backend is pretty fast, so it's something on the frontend that makes it go slow. Probably external API calls or something. What you can do is disable plugins / modules and see which one is the culprit. If you want some help I can help you (i'm also dutch and i work with virtuemart, info {AT} yuzi.nl)