Dolphin crashing server out of the blue

I have 7.0.8 installed on a VPS server and haven't had this issue before, but suddenly yesterday the Dolphin script started pounding the hell out of my CPU which led to a complete crash of the VPS server 5 times in one day. Not good.

I've had my hosting provider researching it and I've been looking around as well. The host says: "The <dolphin> site is overloading the server. At any given time there are at least 31 requests for the "simple messenger" component alone, which can be heavy on the server." So I added this to my search but I can't find any reason why this is suddenly popping up (or why the simple messenger is flaring up even when there is no one on the site? FYI one of the crashes happened when I threw up a maintenance page and there was no one on the site, so def no one using the msgr). I've found several people on the forum have had this same issue over the past 3 years, but there doesn't seem to be any real 'fix' to the problem. I've made sure that all of the fixes suggested were implemented on my site (all of the coding fixes suggested were implemented during prior upgrades, evidently, so that's good). I've seen suggestions on other dev forums that turning of awstats can help lower the strain on the cpu, but I hesitate to start messing with the settings on my server when this seems to be a fairly common issue with the dolphin software itself.

Has anyone found what it is in the script that is causing the CPU to be bombarded randomly? And even better, anyone found a solution??

Thanks.

I still haven't found the mystery cpu hog that is spiking my resources, but I have found several tweaks to optimize a VPS server via WHM, which cut my general cpu usage in half and stopped the server from crashing (at least for the moment. These may be obvious to more experienced VPS users, but they were all new to me and I thought I'd share:

• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings and turn of Mailman (which is a huge memory glutton)
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings change the minutes on mail server queue runs from 60 to 120 or 180
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings turn off Spam Assassin
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings turn reverse dns lookup off
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings Disable Analog Stats and AWStats and Webalizer (keep Webalizer if you really want to, but Google analytics works better in my opinion)
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings Turn off the conserve memory option (this sacrifices memory for cpu usage, so if you're having memory issues this probably isn't an option for you!)
• WHM>Server Configuration>Tweak settings make sure "Delete each domain’s access logs after stats run" is set to on so that it doesn't save everything and eat up tons of memory (this should be a default setting)
• WHM>Service Configuration Turn off anonymous FTP (a good idea to do anyway)
• CPanel>File Manager> check out all of your backups, they all store in your files and can eat up huge memory chunks. Download and save any that you feel you really need and only keep the last valid backup in place.

sources: https://www.solarvps.com/forums/index.php?topic=330.0 and http://www.earnersblog.com/vps-optimization-guide/ (there are tons more suggestions on both of the links above, but I avoided anything that I thought might interfere w/ Dolphin's operations... and anything that I didn't know wtf it was so I figured it was best to leave it alone)